Why Climate Change Won't Be Stopped (2018)
ecosophia.dreamwidth.org
ecosophia.dreamwidth.org
The same thing is true for climate change. When people who demand a war-time mobilization of the economy to combat climate change still emit gigatons going on foreign vacations, that signals to people one of two things. One, the reduction in standard of living required to address climate change must be enormous, because even those who believe catastrophe is at our doorstep won't suffer that reduction unless the government forces them to. Or two, those people don't really believe climate change will be that bad, and their demand for government intervention is a pretext for something else.
Foreign vacations (which aren't even occurring in 2020) are a pittance here...we're talking about billions of fossil-fuel powered engines, hundreds of millions of livestock, heating and cooling homes for upwards of 10 billion humans, the production of steel, fertilizer, plastics, concrete, electronics, mining operations, shipping, trucking...it's just so much more vast than the hypocrisy of rich leftist environmentalists going on vacations.
it would be a rude wake-up call for most if suddenly this stuff had to be produced responsibly, without planned obsolecense or presumption of free landfill storage.
however, this is exactly what needs to happen. and it needs to happen via regulation of the giant producers, because capitalism is not compatible with anything but maximizing profits and minimizing costs. individual action is mostly meaningless - if people had to personally kill the cattle they eat many would likely swear off meat. without direct involvement in the damaging process of production consumers are fsr too removed to stop consuming ethically-compromised, cheap goods.
It's not about actual role in climate change. It's about your image, as an activist, in a public eye.
Publuc eye is stupid. It's certainly guilty of logical errors you accuse it off – you're right about that. However, you will not be able to actually convince this public eye that he makes these mistakes, exactly because it's pretty dumb.
So, if you actually want to convince people en masse about something, you have to play by the rules of this PR game, even though you may very well understand that the rules are stupid and people make logical mistakes.
The point you're missing is that people who advocate for sweeping policy change - the sort that will require people to drastically change their lifestyles, as well as drastically changing the way human industry operates - are more likely to be taken seriously when they change their lifestyles in advance.
That's not the point here. The point is that climate activists ask their government for big changes because they fear civilization could end otherwise. And those big changes would have significant impact on the lifestyle of almost all people affected by these laws. So, why should one be willing to (and thus, vote for the changes) change ones lifestyle, if the advocates just say "well, I stop travelling abroad, when everyone else stops as well (and other carbon emission is reduced, too)"? The OP is about credibility, or, even lower level: sympathy.
Maybe it becomes more obvious if we look at one specific example. In the Netherlands they lowered maximum speed on highways to 100 km/h (from 120 km/h). Correct me if I'm wrong but the carbon saving from that law is close to non-existent compared to the whole economy's carbon emissions.
Or, the whole EU banned light bulbs. Also, the energy saving compared to the whole EU's energy consumption is probably sub 1%. And with the advent of white LEDs, people just use more light and the overall effect is even less.
Both measurments combined have an impact less than your claimed 5%-10%. Does that mean that government should stop taking small steps, and only the "big shot" counts?
Or can small steps (by governments OR individuals) be a tool to increase awareness?
But think broader, about concrete and steel and shipping, the really hard areas. There is no "choice" about steel, it's a technological and policy issue...Even if we cleaned up our individual consumer choices, that won't change the need for steel or change how it's produced in a dirty way.
Look at a wind turbine, for instance. It's a giant tower of steel. Even though we need wind turbines as fast as possible, we still need dirty steel to ramp those up, and we need new tech to then make future steel cleaner.
This is why focusing on individual choice is so small. Even if all us rich Westerners went vegan and rode bikes to work, that wouldn't address all the tricky technological and chemical issues.
Only if you offload moral culpability onto third parties that are acting on your behalf.
You'd probably say you aren't responsible for the climate change due to power companies that use coal instead of green energy. But I'd argue you are responsible for any non-essential energy use since you know they are going to burn coal to generate it.
If you turn on an air conditioner when your home is cooler than 95 degrees, that carbon usage is 100% on you.
Same goes for agriculture. If you stopped buying meat, they'd stop producing meat for you.
If your point is that the masses won't make those trade offs voluntarily, you are probably right. But the point of the article is that its entirely unconvincing to say society must reduce our standard of living by force when you won't do it voluntarily.
I think that "reducing standards of living by force" is an extremist position and it's unhelpful to even bring it up.
Switching electricity generation and transport towards renewables can have large impacts on CO2 emissions with very low impact on standards of living. Carbon taxes would raise some bills but the effect is much less than (for example) stopping air conditioning.
We're already doing that. But it's not close to being enough. Emissions need to be halved by 2030 to keep to 1.5C warming: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-emissions/.... The recent economic shut-down from Covid-19 cut U.S. emissions by just 1/3 for one week in April: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/05/19/corona....
A carbon tax that doesn't raise cost much is not going to have much effect.
Though that depends on how you interpret "much." If you double energy cost, upper middle class folks won't change their thermostat, but work class folks won't be able to afford to turn on their AC.
Most plans I've seen that involve an energy tax involve moving that money back to the working class via reduced taxes or rebates.
I think that a better comparison would be "a still-active meth addict who advocates for government action that would likely deprive them of the ability to continue using meth."
In this scenario the addict actually has some 'skin in the game' as opposed to just preaching.
But I think the article misses the point. In a classic Tragedy of the Commons problem, the participants don't need to abstain from feeding in the commons in order to organize a ban on it.
In fact, such self-abstainments are self-defeating because they cause the good actors to lose economic power and then have less ability to force systemic change.
I find that telling people to live with low CO2 footprints to be a whataboutism distraction to have them economically nerf themselves, hence silencing their economic power to force systemic change.
...now imagine that on a global international level. The ability to force change is correlated to economic power - which "good actor" countries are sacrificing, and "bad actor" countries are filling the void.
For these reasons, change can only happen with a global international accord that has an enforcement mechanism. ...and hence one of the reasons, I personally don't think Climate Change will be stopped.
Poorer countries see richer countries say “no more fossil fuels” and could easily think “gee it’s convenient that you built the whole world economy around fossil fuels then try to stop their use just as we’re catching up.”
In the same way, in the US a lot of folks react to climate policy things with: “so rich folks will still be able to fly cross-country for 10x the price in an ‘eco plane’ but regular people will be cut off from that freedom.”
At the end of the day people are pretty much not willing to accept a quality of life cut voluntarily, especially not a significant one. Thus you see people say: okay so the oceans will rise, but I don’t live within an hour of the ocean so I’m fine. Yep, not willing to sacrifice my personal luxuries and freedoms for that. Folks should just move as the waters rise.
I think the far scarier issue is the second Order effects we can’t predict. But because we can’t predict it, the people who aren’t inclined to want to give up their quality of life (almost everyone), are even less likely to want to make preventative changes.
But there's also a different way to view this: This is a textbook tragedy of the commons situation. Basically we're stuck in regime where at the individual level, you're hurting yourself if you're doing the right thing, for almost zero gain to the environment. Getting out of that regime takes concerted action, which most likely will not happen without regulation. The most effective way to help solve the problem is therefore to push for that regulation. That's probably unless you're a celebrity or something.
If you ARE in fact hurting yourself too much, then you prove that people can chose one from the following:
A) keep the status quo, but the planet will most probably heat up and very bad things happen.
B) change the status quo to something that really, really hurts. But the reward for your surrender is that there is a chance that the planet does not heat up so much and less bad things happen a few decades from now.
That is what most people perceive in climate activists.
For example: If a really painful Carbon tax was introduced over night, the next day people's lives would look a lot different. Activities that used to be mundane would suddenly be expensive luxuries.
However, that's ignoring the fact that the economy would start to route around this tax. What are currently still niche low-carbon technologies will get a lot cheaper due to economies of scale. Photovoltaics are already a super cheap way of making electricity while the sun shines - suddenly there's going to be a huge incentive to building out storage.
(Of course, you wouldn't actually do that over night.)
But again, the OP is about credibility. So, for the advocates of legislation changes (e.g. climate activists) it would give their credibility a huge boost if they started to surrender symbolically from things like traveling abroad (and also, would remove a rhetorically very easy target from their critics).
The proposed legislation itself should of course refrain from being "just" symbolic.
With something like Rape, it is wrong and cannot be tolerated in even the smallest amount. Zero is the only acceptable level of rape.
Pollution is different. We all know that exterminating the majority of the human population and returning to a hunter/gatherer society is not an option. The realistic goal isn't to eliminate all forms of pollution everywhere, it is to reduce the pollution to a level that is less harmful to the planet. The problem is in identifying where and how deep to make the cuts.
Such a situation allows for a person to continue to eat meat, live in a big house and take vacations, while simultaneously calling for cuts to deforestation, legislating for EV transport and nuclear power, and do so without hypocrisy. Essentially you can have each group say "make the cuts, and make them deep, but make them over there".
For example a person could sit around and light barrels of oil on fire and create legislation that changed the incentives regarding energy production (which we already do a lot of and is one of the only effective things we do at scale to affect climate outcomes) or that bans or changes costs for plastic production and still come out leagues ahead in terms of having changed things for the better.
Sure if you are publicly announcing that you are lighting the oil on fire, no one is going to take your legislation seriously but the reality is there is no good source of record keeping on people's day to day behavior unless the consciously expose it so you could simultaneously live a horrificly environmentally unfriendly lifestyle and improve things.
My point is not that you should do this, but that the idea this change is going to swell from the ground up is nonsense. It needs to come from well organized legislation. That piece of legislation is probably not going to be much affected by the individual track record in the hundreds of people who end up being involved in its production.
Appealing to virtuousness and living by example, is not going to replace regulation and realigned incentives.
With the pandemic:
1) deaths/impact directly from the pandemic can be relatively easily identified
2) deaths/impact happen in the space of weeks
3) the positive results of mitigations can be seen in weeks
4) countries can largely isolate the impact other countries have on them regarding the pandemic.
None of these 4 points are true with climate change so it's going to be even worse in terms of getting people to take it seriously and act in time. We can't even get countries to agree that masks are a good idea.
How much of this is because of the points I mentioned though? The US and the UK took their time going into lockdown for example.
In contrast and largely because of the time scales of climate change, it would be even easier to deny the negative impact of climate change and deny the positive influence of preemptive action.
A large amount of discussion has been around "what is a COVID19 death?" If someone dies with COVID19 in their system, does that count as a COVID19 death?
There are the clear cut cases where someone dies on a ventilator while testing COVID19 positive. A straightforward COVID19 death.
But there are clear negative cases: Consider someone who has COVID19, but gets into a car crash and dies. This ideally wouldn't be a COVID19 death, because it was clear that the car crash killed the person.
But from here on out... cases get more complicated.
But what about someone who tested COVID19 positive, but dies of a heart attack? COVID19 clearly stresses the body, going on oxygen or other treatment, has been proven to cause long term chronic issues. But do we know for sure that the heart attack was causally related to the COVID19 virus?
There's also the case of long-term chronic issues. COVID19 causes kidney damage and lung damage. If (formerly COVID19 patients) people start dying of Kidney failure next year, it is probably COVID19 related, but with a year delay.
This muddles the death count, and ultimately it comes down to individual medical opinions of thousands of doctors. In the case of the heart attack, we classify it as a COVID19 death if it is the opinion of the doctor. I'm not sure if there's a better solution, but that's how the US works.
Your claims seem rather hypothetical otherwise.
No. But that's why I bring it up as a hypothetical. This is the hypothetical everyone is supposed to agree with... Because the simple "COVID19 in the system when they die" is clearly not a proper definition.
In practice: The big question is the consistency of the "heart attack" case. What each individual doctor determines to be a COVID19 death isn't really consistent in that situation. It can't be, every medical scenario is different.
I'm sure we could agree that "what is a climate change death?" is going to be an even harder question to answer, and therefore even easier to purposefully deny, which is my core point.
Optimistically, I'm coming to the opposite conclusion as you: Maybe more people will understand now that you can't ignore that just because it's politics.
There's no way humans are just gonna cut back on eating meat, demand a removal of single-use plastics, crack down on resource-intensive industries (almond milk is INCREDIBLY inefficient and only getting more popular, for instance), and fight to pass laws which force companies to get cleaner (thus increasing the cost of those products).
I've met a handful of people in my life who care enough to live a greener lifestyle beyond making one or two relatively convenient changes in their life, let alone overhaul their entire lifestyle.
It's absolutely down to the wizards working on green tech to solve the issue.
You don't think taxing meat by its environmental cost will work?
> crack down on resource-intensive industries (almond milk is INCREDIBLY inefficient and only getting more popular, for instance)
Almond uses an order of magnitude less land, emissions and water than dairy so why not crack down on dairy if you feel this way?
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46654042
We already grow then feed soy to cows to get milk, why not just drink soy directly?
Economically, it would work. Politically? At least in the US, people would vote out any party that installed taxes that reduced meat consumption by an significant amount. We don't even have the political willpower to make energy slightly more expensive.
Also, you're absolutely correct that dairy milk is less efficient by a long-shot, I was just pointing to it because I know a lot of people I personally know are moving to it and away from dairy as though it's a quality alternative. It's better, but still not great.
- It still needs energy to be built and to run, so it still (ultimately) depends on petrol to run. Petrol still emits CO2 and, more worryingly, conventional crude oil has peaked in 2008 and is in decline since then: https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/iea-2018-worl...
- At the scale we need to capture carbon, we start hitting other issues, namely the shortage of materials needed for building them
Unfortunately those technologies won't "solve" the problem, merely move the goalposts
A large part of the world has basically stopped functioning for a few months. People stayed home, industries didn't produce anything, restaurants stopped serving people, and so on. It was a huge stress on everyone and now that we're reopening up the overall sentiment is that never should the world halt like that again. Governments everywhere are mentioning the idea that maybe we should change something, but the real mindset is to start like before, and work even more for lower wages to compensate for the loss.
It is estimated that over the whole year, the emissions of CO2-equivalent will have gone down by 4% in 2020. There are only 2 years in the 20th century when this happened: 1929, the Great Depression, and 1945, because the industrial powerhouses that Germany and Japan were are not producing anything anymore. We've had the same this year.
But the other fun stats is that if we want to achieve the +2C goal of 2100, that is directly correlated to the amount of CO2-equivalent that has been emitted since the beginning of the industrial revolution; the quota we have until 2100 is such that we need to reduce our emissions every year, and this reduction must be 4% compared to the year before.
In other words, we need an additional lockdown every year, until 2100. That's the scale of the change, and when I see what happens after a single one, it is clear to me we will never reach that +2C in 2100.
I've seen people point out that emissions haven't dropped much during lockdown but isn't that because manufacturing, mining, shipping, animal farming etc. and everything else that supports our personal unsustainable lifestyles would have largely been continuing as normal ready for things to restart?
E.g. maybe you're not going to launch a cruise ship during lockdown or go on a cruise, but cruise ships are still getting designed, ordered and built during lockdown.
Productivity gains only come marginally from optimization. Most productivity gains are from bigger machines (that eat more energy than smaller ones).
80% of our energy is from carbon, we have to cut 4% of this every year starting last year to have a chance to barely stay below 2C.
This mean cutting what's feeding our machines by ~3% per year. So productivity losses. By cutting less productive sectors first we might manage that without entering recession for a few year, but even with that, thousands of people will be left over.
> without entering recession for a few year
Isn't the problem we can't keep growing when there's only finite resources?
We need to change our definition of what it means for the country/world to be improving.
Of course, you can in our universe for an estimated 1e38 years.
The point being that if there is a big enough supply of something that doesn't renew to last until the next breakthrough there is no problem. Never in the history of the human race has this failed.
Will oil last until we get fusion figured out? It seems to me pretty likely that's a yes.
Considering that commercial fusion is nowhere near us for the next ~100 years, we're in for a very bad time.
The good thing is that this recession is going to happen anyway, because the supply of fossil fuel is dwindling already.
Human nature is such that people (in aggregate) don’t take a threat seriously until it’s affecting people they know or places they care about. And when the government tries to force the issue it generates serious backlash.
Case in point, look at Texas pandemic response. The state adopted a lockdown and restrictions pretty early on because they saw what was happening in Europe and New York. But those places are very far away, and Texas is a very big state. No city had more than a dozen or so cases at that time, and a heavy test and trace policy might have been viable for slowing things down for another week or two.
But ironically, because the government locked down before the crisis was acute locally, there was a huge backlash and they lifted the lockdown prematurely - which I think psychologically reinforced the idea that the disease “wasn’t going to be a problem in TX.” Now cases are skyrocketing, they’re rolling back the reopening, but compliance with the restrictions is very low.
In short, I don’t think the majority cares about risks until their own neighborhood is burning.
Thus the effective solution to societal problems must be (1) easy, (2) cheap, and/or (3) come with exciting benefits right now.
You can see this in action with Elon Musk and Tesla. His stated vision is to eliminate the combustion automobile. His approach is to make a “way cooler car” that people really want and that is seen as superior to the old cars, and then over time figure out how to drive the price down to where there’s no reason to buy combustion anymore. It takes a really long time, but it seems to be working.
I still have an accountant do my taxes, in order to pay as little as possible. I do not think this is hypocritical.
It doesn't make sense for me to completely upend my life unless society is collectively doing the same. The way to make that happen is sweeping government action, and nothing less.
Another solution is to take some of the extra money gathered and spend it on better educating children and adults about tax.
Well, I know that the answer is going to be "the Democrats", but the reality is, that isn't helping... I mean, sure, the upper middle class (high-skill workers) might be taxed a bit more, but the big money - upper class (non-workers) and multi-national corporations - have continued to avoid taxes. Arguably the Democrats have also caused a lot of lost wealth for the public by encouraging the expansion of financial services - Clinton's administration by repealing the Glass–Steagall Act, and Obama's by not properly acting against Wall Street after the GFC. And for obvious reasons - poor politicians are getting kickbacks if they continue ignoring this issue.
It is not about one-sidedly upending your life, and also not about waiting until society collectively does the right thing. We need to start acting, and every tiny little bit by every person counts. By doing that tiny bit - and maybe gradually a little more here and there - together with 1,000's of others doing so too, a pressure is created, culture changes and movement in the right direction ensues.
A lobbyist directly influences legislation by advocating for specific policies. Lobbying against climate legislation (or paying people to lobby against climate legislation) while privately voting in favor of it would be like me coming on HN and saying "climate change is a hoax" while privately voting for a carbon tax.
Where is that line crossed though? It's a murky one, that is for sure. There is not exact dollar amount. I'd say there is no line at all, everyone is responsible.
Similarly with CC, there is no line. Any effort is a good effort, even if it 'doesn't matter compared to ... '.
We're all hypocrites in the end, not a single one of us is perfect (depends on your religion, though, I guess). With CC, that means that any effort you can put in is 'worth it'. This is not a 0% or 100% thing. Even 1% is good.
The key here is that collective action is the only way to fix climate change. So, on a personal level, I'd rather donate to environmental activism groups than buy more expensive "green" groceries or some such. And I'd encourage everyone else to do the same!
This would suffice. Let capitalism take care of the rest. It is simple insane that we are rolling with 1.3M year old technologies (burning shit) when new technologies already available because government intervention. Renewables, nuclear energy and few more alternatives already exist yet we are paying big money to oil companies to mine oil, do fracking (good bye clean water later) and burn coal. Absolutely insane, cave man level, literally.
Who cares if US-centric emissions go to 0 if the rest of the world goes up 3x+ because developing economies go for the cheapest energy sources?
But the changes we actually need run much deeper, and they would directly impact our lifestyle, because our current one is not sustainable. The problem with that is that if governments were to attempt to implement those changes, they will be voted out. For instance, the French government tried to do a carbon tax, but was met with weeks of violent protests.
It's also a game theory issue for governments: putting a carbon tax on your country's production will make your economy less competitive compared to those that won't. You can mitigate the consequences for that by carbon taxing imports, but that will not help you with your exports.
The bottom line is that we need to do much more, but it's politically not feasible at this point. It will only be when people's lives are being much more severely impacted, but by that time, it will be too late to avoid a catastrophic outcome. IMO the only realistic hope we have is the development of active carbon capture technologies that can be deployed on a global scale. Whether that is feasible in time remains to be seen.
In exactly what sense is our current lifestyle not sustainable? The way you've stated the assumption it's analogous to arguing that we can't feed billions of humans. That's precisely the Malthusian argument, which was wrong. Agricultural productivity has increased by orders of magnitude in the last couple of centuries.
I'm not arguing against solving climate change. But the "we have to change everything" formulation is very limiting. In fact, I think it's pretty much a guarantee that we'll experience catastrophic effects.
I've always lived a very low-impact life in proportion to my rise up in economics until just this very year or so, although I am going on 6 years as a vegetarian. Not bad for 56 years I think. I even lived a year in Indonesia in a rice-farming village with predominantly dirt floors with electricity equal to one US apartment (not house) running the few bulbs, radios and TVs in a local population of 100 plus people. I was very happy, and maybe I will go back there, and wait out this disaster (Covid-19, modern life!). I am capable of doing high-tech work, or fix-anything work, so I don't need to be tethered to the internet or a computer to earn my living. I like to think of what Harlan Ellison would write about all of the smart phones, tablets, etc. in the same vein as he did in "The Glass Teat" about television and its sequel "Another Glass Teat". I like Scott Locklin's disparaging term for these and many other modern must-haves as "nerd dildos".
Change will happen by you and I making personal choices and changes and coming to the realization that all the things we think we need, we don't, or at least not in the quantities we believe we do. Eventually lack of outdoor life, sitting all day hunched over a screen, and avoiding reality will have its consequences with bad backs, hearts, minds and spirits, so government or no government, individual lifestyle changes or not, consequences will come a calling and give us feedback whether we like it or not. I am a believer in what the author attributes and quotes from Ghandi, but here's the actual quote:
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Gandhi
The way to achieve that is by developing a set of substitutions, and having rich people migrate to these substitutions and having poor people work towards them. Many claim that this is impossible, but the fact is that we have barely even begun trying to do this.
For example, all ground transportation can be electrified - cars, trucks, semis, trains, etc. There is now a very clear path towards this that did not exist 10 years ago. All electricity generation can be decarbonized in tandem. Homes can be heated with carbon-free electric heat pumps by automating geothermal installations. Short-haul flights be be electrified within a few years. None of this is a missed opportunity, nothing is too late. We are just starting to realize this path and there is a lot of work to do.
It’s unsustainable on a fundamental level, driven by a consumerism that triggers primal behavior.
You might not have to cut down, but someone eventually have to. There’s no way around that.
https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days...
For one, the more people that buy products that are more environmentally-friendly, the more the market will shift towards offering environmentally-friendly options. If consumers were beating down car dealership doors to buy every EV they could, car manufacturers would shift heavily towards EVs. If everyone buying a house were looping in a solar panel installation into their loan, we'd probably see more competition and faster price drops in solar panels. The more people that buy meat alternatives, the more money gets invested in developing meat alternatives.
Secondly, each individual action has the potential to influence someone else. If you see your neighborhood switching to EV's, you may be more likely to buy one. Or if a friend had a great experience with reducing their energy costs by upgrading their windows, you might be more likely to get it done yourself.
Put the first two factors together, and then it is much, much easier to build political support for the legislation needed to enact big climate change initiatives. If more people take personal ownership of climate change, that helps those people drive political will towards addressing climate change. Politicians absolutely will respond to public pressure, but if the public is largely indifferent on the issue, it makes it less likely politicians will spend political capital on climate change initiatives.
this logic is part of the problem. you live in a privileged bubble where people buy electric cars and install solar panels on their houses. Median American household has only $10K saved up, many below that and live paycheck to paycheck. What EV/What homes/ solar panels? First we have to solve socio-economic wealth gap issue THEN address climate change.
On an individual level, if someone has the means to reduce their carbon footprint, why shouldn't they? On a national level, developed nations have more capital they can spend on shifting to clean energy. Poorer countries won't be able to afford to make some of those shifts. If the nations with the means make the shifts first, they can help bring down the costs of some of those green technologies to where it's more feasible for poorer nations in the world.
We're already at the point that wind and solar power is starting to be cheaper than coal power. Continuing along that path means the developing world can continue developing and expanding their economies with clean energy instead of fossil fuels.
So, the theory here is that if we only purify ourselves enough, we'll finally get climate skeptics to listen? If we only take on all the systemic problems with personal sacrifices?
Like, don't show up to important policy meetings on principle because we'd have to fly there? It should be the other way around. Full-time climate activists should get to fly where-ever they want, whenever they want, and the rest of us should avoid flying.
I don't think the article's theory of change is how any other kind of policy change happens. The strength of belief demonstrated by a minority doesn't, by itself, convince anyone or move policymakers.
If you base your credibility on being a perfect example of how you want others to act, it's exactly what the climate skeptics want. You'll fail and they'll laugh at you. Because in this society we're all complicit until there are systemic solutions.
I think there's more evidence for a small minority moving public opinion and public policy when they act in a coordinated, continuous campaign. Self-perfection doesn't come into it. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/why-nonviolen...
Me reducing my personal carbon footprint is a drop in the bucket compared to cutting CPU time at work, and that’s a drop in the bucket compared to voting in a Green New Deal politician.
Reducing my personal carbon foot print is harder than reducing work’s carbon footprint. So, I’ll start there, and vote and donate to political campaigns accordingly (because that’s easier and has higher impact)
Ordering actions by cost benefit doesn’t make me a hypocrite, it makes me an effective pragmatist.
Then it is wrong for two reasons: 1a. Normal Americans on the left, and many on the right, are convinced by climate intellectuals. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi... 1b. Normal Europeans of all stripes are likewise convinced. 2. (This is anecdata, but I'm pretty confident it'd appear in experimentation if anyone cared to debunk this dumb hypothesis.) Climate intellectuals that make significant efforts to avoid hypocrisy (like Greta, or her less-famous counterparts, or me to a lesser degree) do not experience a different reception from skeptics.
Indeed, personal action is rarely a point of interest for anyone in the discussion. Probably because the focus of the climate intellectuals -- renewable electricity, decarbonizing heavy industry, land use practices -- is so obviously outside the scope of direct personal action.
In fact the whole premise of the article is just wrong on its face. In fact people who care about climate issues do tend to have lower energy footprints than climate change deniers! We drive smaller cars. We commute shorter distances. We live in denser communities. We eat less meat. We eat local food. We use less water. This can all be measured.
Is it enough? Of course not. But in fact to the extent individual action can be used in service to this goal, we're doing it. Get on board.
A better analogy might be forest fires. What the author is saying is that you can't be against forest fires unless you also never light a candle in your home. Or perhaps that you can't be against pollution if you ever throw something in the trash.
I disagree with his implicit presumption that "solving" climate change necessarily involves willfully lowering one's quality of life. Austerity is not a goal, it is possibly a necessary step to fixing the problem. But just martyring yourself will not magically fix climate change. In fact, ideal solutions to climate change do not involve lowering quality of life because that makes them much easier to adopt.
When asbestos was discovered to cause cancer, we didn't fix that problem by having every individual tear the insulation out of their homes and make a personal commitment to freeze their ass off every winter. We outlawed it and used our existing large-scale systems like the law to solve what was a large-scale systemic problem. That in turn drove innovation to find better alternatives and here we are all now mostly safe from that problem.
I do as much as I can as an individual because I believe, morally, that it's true: I'd feel like a fraud if I was seriously concerned about climate and didn't become a vegetarian, refused to own a car, and stopped international travel.
I try to buy only what I need, second hand if I can, to avoid putting more technology in the waste system. I avoid buying plastic. I do everything I can on an individual level.
But you know what?
Global politics don't seem to be moving nearly as fast or with any urgency to the matter. In the US the EPA has been practically gutted. In my own country the local government is using the pandemic as a cover to move on gutting our own environmental protections.
We still need collective policy action on a global scale like we've seen with the pandemic.
Unfortunately we're already decades too late to stop it. Even if we could turn off the carbon switch right now, we'll still have to suffer through some of the worst IPCC predictions.
If I stop eating beef (which I have) there isn't an equivalent reduction in beef production. Instead the price goes down fractionally and someone else eats it. If a whole bunch of people stop eating beef (which I hope I'm part of) then we'll start to see some reduction in production.
The answer to global warming like any externality is market regulation. Exactly _how_ you regulate that is less important: Maybe revenue neutral tax on producers? Maybe a ration book for consumers?
Personal change is certainly helpful to demonstrate you're serious, but structural change will be necessary to actually tackle the problem.
It doesn't seem to work this way either. First there will be a long period of beef sources trying to create demand, through marketing, lobbying, etc tactics. Only after they have spent through substantial subsidies, loans, bailouts, etc will they be forced to downsize.
As an example: we recently saw a huge decrease in air travel demand. Response from the airlines? Keep flying the same number of routes in order to maintain status at airports. Run promotions to increase sales.
It has two cheap rhetorical ploys.
First, a crude and disgusting analogy with rape, of all things. (There's a much better analogy to the governmental action that stopped CFCs, and actually worked.)
Second, an accusation of hypocrisy that is completely without actual facts.
And more important: so what if some elites who profess to care about climate change fly too much? It's deeply un-serious to demand pure motives on the part of everyone who professes a certain policy, before taking action.
Counterpoint, organized by a climate researcher: https://noflyclimatesci.org
This article was pilloried at the time for its negativity, but I think Franzen’s article, “What If We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped,” ultimately has it right.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/culture/cultu...
I never believed 1.5 degrees would ever be reached, but the message from so many politicians was that "we need to try our best to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees". Everybody must have known that it was bullshit all along.
And that is why climate change won't be stopped.
I agree there is a lot of hypocrisy in the modern environmental movement but status quo bias and corruption play a larger role in our situation than a lack of credibility from environmentalists
The biggest CO2 emitters are electricity generation and transport and these can be affected by government policy that encourages renewable sources.
Every time I hear some Hollywood talking head going on about the urgency of climage change, I just ask myself: Why should I lower my family's standard of living, when this actor is basking in adulation while burning 25 times the carbon we do?
Incredibly selfish, I know. On both our parts.
Honestly, I do make an effort to limit my impact on the planet. But I do what my conscience tells me to do. Celebrity endorsements don't move the needle at all for me, at least not in the right direction.
100% Agreed.
In principle capitalism itself is not the primary ecological problem; capitalism could extract profits in a closed non exponential system by exploiting gradients in efficiency incumbent with technological improvements. That could even incentivise climate improvement. It's when there is a secular incentive to mindlessly grow that capitalism becomes a menace.
But climate change advocates are not the only ones to blame. Absolutely nobody wants to change their behavior: no individual, no company, no country.
And so climate change is simply unavoidable. Trying to mitigate it is a waste of time IMHO; finding ways to live with it may be more fruitful.