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Comment by perfunctory | Hacker News Reader

Adjusting your lifestyle and behaviour in line with climate goals is not about making a difference. It's about being a decent person. You don't throw litter into the street even though it's a drop in the ocean. You don't bully somebody just because everybody else does, even though it makes little difference. You do the things you do because you are a good decent person.

If you know about climate change and you still fly, invest in fossil fuel, consume extravagantly [edit: or anything you know has a large impact and you could reasonably do without (no, I don't know how to define reasonable in this context)] you are just a bad person. Sorry.

edit2: I am just saying this because I am desperate. And scared.

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That's just a narrative to shift responsibility from government and industry to the individual. Individual action is virtually meaningless[1]. The solution is really quite simple, but nobody wants to accept it:

1: Properly price pollution -> aka carbon tax. Use Nordhaus' climate club plan to combat the knee-jerk "but China" reaction.

2: industry will adjust appropriately to stay profitable

3: individuals will follow

I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/2019/5/28/186...

Edit: individual action isn't completely meaningless of course; every little bit helps. The biggest benefit of individual action IMO is that it shows your government that you care about this. Vote and be loud about it.

> Properly price pollution

I don't know how to price pollution.

And I've been voting for the "right" policies my whole life. It didn't help.

If "Adjusting your lifestyle and behaviour in line with climate goals is not about making a difference," then why does it matter that your voting didn't help? You are a good person after all.

Really though, what is your point here? Can you imagine if a politician whose platform was fighting climate change walked into CoalTown USA and told everyone that they were bad people? Do you think that would help?

I don't mean to get into the weeds of argument and rhetoric, but if we ARE going to accomplish anything on the level that this problem requires, then we have to be convincing, not smug.

A carbon tax and dividend is considered a pretty good idea by many economists. There is information about an American initiative to enact this here https://citizensclimatelobby.org/.

The "right" policies were never there for you to vote for.

> If you know about climate change and you still fly, invest in fossil fuel, consume extravagantly you are just a bad person. Sorry.

I do these things, but I don't think I'm a bad person.

I believe that collective action is the only effective way to make progress, and I choose accordingly at the polling booth. I believe that taxation of activity that accurately takes into account environmental damage is our current best way of deciding what should and should not be acceptable, and again I support this at the polling booth. Unfortunately the majority seem to disagree with me currently, which I believe is true by definition as otherwise we'd have made more political progress.

I don't believe that individual action (by self-censoring) can make any significant difference. I will be pleased to abide by restrictions society places on me for the good of the environment, including limiting or paying taxes to compensate for my own consumption, etc. Until that happens, it seems to me that unilaterally doing this myself only harms me compared to the majority who don't seem to care. I still have to play by the economic rules set by others, and suffer the consequences. I don't see why I should harm myself while others, who do not care and form the majority, gain.

You might think this is hypocritical. I disagree: I play the game I am forced to play, while advocating the changing of the rules. If you choose to harm your own position in the game by following the rule changes you wish for, then that's fine, but it's a step that I don't believe makes a difference and one I'm not prepared to take.

> You don't throw litter into the street even though it's a drop in the ocean.

Society has figured out that this costs us environmentally, has rules against littering, and I follow them. (Also littering has quite an obvious effect on the appearance of the general area, so there is an obvious localised benefit to not littering).

> You don't bully somebody just because everybody else does, even though it makes little difference.

Actually, it does make a difference. Localised changes in behaviour aren't that difficult to achieve.

i'm not trying to attack you personally, and i don't think you're a bad person, but i think you're mistaken. we are living in sodom, and you have the choice to be Lot or to be a random citizen, and you chose to be a random citizen because "everyone else is doing it".

i understand the resistance to unilateral action, but that doesn't change what the right thing to do is.

> and you chose to be a random citizen because "everyone else is doing it".

You're projecting. That is not the reason I gave. The reason I gave is that it would cause me either economic harm or reduce my enjoyment of life to do so, for what I perceive to be no practical gain (it does not, IMHO, advance the environmental cause).

doing a little market research for a side project i'm working on -- https://spaceshipearth.org -- if you thought that taking individual action actually does advance the environmental cause, would you take the action?

in our project, we hope to get you to take individual action with a group of your friends, so your collective impact is amplified. we're also hoping to show you the quantitative impact of your contribution.

would this help to change your mind at all? or do you a-priori think individual action has no benefit?

> if you thought that taking individual action actually does advance the environmental cause, would you take the action?

That's a very general question. We were talking about merely modifying behaviour to reduce consumption. Now it seems that you're talking about something else. It depends on if you're asking me to modify existing behaviour or take some new action, the actual details, the cost to me (including social cost) for taking that action, and the quantified expected benefit to the environment.

"You deferred climate catastrophe by one year" would probably be worth doing. "You deferred climate catastrophe by 0.00004 seconds" would probably not - I'd rather have spent that effort convincing one other person to vote differently.

Why stop there? Are you currently using solar power? Do you use the bus instead of walking? What's your food habits - do you eat meat? What clothes are you currently wearing? Where do you live? How large is it? Does it need heating or air conditioning?

You're drawing the "this makes an awful person" line at a super arbitrary point.

Those are all perfectly valid questions when making such a value judgment, yes. We're past the point of no return, here. Everything matters.

I was expecting a reply along these lines. Just because you don't kill yourself to eliminate all emissions doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do what you can.

I'm just saying - you're a bad person. Sorry.

I don't know if it's your intention, but it comes across to me that you're advocating doing nothing, which strikes me as bad.

I'm not - we absolutely need to do something. What I am advocating against is drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and going "well, I don't still fly, invest in fossil fuel, or consume extravagantly, therefore I'm fine and a good person." Even if you do those things, you're still going to be part of the problem.

in your opinion, what makes someone part of the solution?

That isnt what you appear to be saying though, it reads as, you are a "bad person" if you don't do $semi_arbitrary_thing. Not, you should be doing all you can.

And in typical human fashion, we're now going to argue over where the moral line is drawn instead of the actual problem.

It was a mistake to try and make it a moral argument to begin with. We need to frame the discussion as "if we all want to survive, we're going to have to do {blah}". Drawing an arbitrary line and calling everyone on one side of it "bad" is creating an artificial division that gives those on the "right" side something to be smug about and those on the "wrong" side something to ignore.

We'll I'm glad that you're here to set everyone straight.

my standard response to this is the one i learned from william macaskill at oxford, and is an extension to a line of reasoning from peter singer.

peter singer believes that if you could save a child's life for two dollars, and you instead spend that money on a coffee, you're in effect killing the child. if you extrapolate this reasoning to it's logical conclusion, it follows that you should be living at the same level as the poorest person in the world so you can donate as much money as possible and still survive.

however, if you start living in a refrigerator box and not doing laundry because you don't want to spend money on detergent, you're likely to lose your cushy tech job for being weird, and then you'll be able to save way fewer children.

so, while it's true that you can go be a hermit in the mountains who only eats berries extracted from bear poop, that might not actually be the most effective way to help the environment. it would preclude you, for instance, from trying to convince someone on hacker news to live a more modest lifestyle, thereby doubling your contribution.

You're not wrong, but I think the idea that climate change is a problem to be solved on the individual level is the prevailing message. It's bad an individual litters plastic bottles. It's worse that we even choose to MAKE plastic bottles. The problem systematically never had to exist.

> If you know about climate change and you still fly ... you are just a bad person

This seems a bit extreme. I fly so my kids can see visit their grandparents once a year. If fighting climate change means sacrificing family, then I guess the planet is toast because I'm not willing to give that up.

this seems sensible.

be mindful of your impact, and try to minimize it, but understand that the world we live in was built with different assumptions and it can be difficult to transition overnight (for instance, in a world where burning fossil fuels is not allowed, you might not have moved so far away from your kid's grandparents that you have to fly to visit them).

"Consume extravagantly". What does that mean? Is that a typical western life style, or flying everywhere by private jet???

"invest in fossil fuel". What does that mean, my pensions invested in index trackers so I guess theres some oil companies in there, but what if I invest in a supermarket that uses plastic packaging and diesel lorries, is that also investing in fossil fuel?

Oil touches every part of our lives, I personally find it exhausting keeping track of all the things I 'should' be doing, without getting judgemental about others.

Ps I say this as someone who doesn't fly, gets 100% green electricity, carbon offset gas, trying to reduce meat consumption, lives in a modest sized house, with one car in the household. I don't throw litter on the street either.

way to go! i think you're on the right path.

I don't think it's productive to use the language of morality (good vs bad) for behavior very far outside the realm of interpersonal relationships.

I think it just makes people defensive (I'm not a bad person!) and even less likely to change.

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