Comment by DFHippie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DFHippie | Hacker News Reader

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Change through government regulation is really only compelled individual change. If everyone changed their behavior of their own free will -- well, we wouldn't need laws at all; this would be a solution for everything!

So, on the one hand I agree with you, justifying one's own failure to change by claiming only federal action will work is mostly just laziness and selfishness papered over with a thin excuse. On the other, mass personal enlightenment will not occur nearly fast enough to solve the problem if it's even possible at all. And in the meantime you'll have unrepentant selfish people freeloading, some of them rolling coal to spite you because they take your virtue as a personal slight or because they're sadists.

By all means, everyone should take this seriously and do what they can without compulsion. I've been striving to do this since the eighties. But honestly if we want to fix the problem the only thing that can come up to scale with sufficient speed is decisions by people who control large segments of the economy, i.e. governments and corporations.

I'll add that my individual action has led through my podcast to working with CEOs, politicians including four of New York City's mayoral candidates, and leaders in sports, arts, and other areas, as well as other podcasts within the This Sustainable Life family.

My personal action is only the starting point to lead others. Mostly I do it to live by my values, but it gives me credibility to lead others too.

I've spent much of my life living in a far more sustainable fashion than most, but besides a personal reduction of guilt it didn't really have any broader impact. I think we need both: folks like yourself leading by example, as well as broad regulatory changes to compel systematic behavioral change (both individual and corporate).

Just having the former is necessary yet insufficient. As stated elsewhere: there's just too many people that are otherwise unwilling to make personal changes. The upside is that when everyone else has accepted or embraced these changes, there's strong social pressure for those dissenters to join. And you can help inspire the early adopters.

But fundamentally we really do need strong political and governmental action here.

> On the other, mass personal enlightenment will not occur nearly fast enough to solve the problem if it's even possible at all ...

> ... honestly if we want to fix the problem the only thing that can come up to scale with sufficient speed is decisions by people who control large segments of the economy, i.e. governments and corporations.

But isn't the first step toward changing things at a governmental level getting the individuals -- who vote for said government officials -- to care about the issues? If people are so resistant to even the idea of individual change (e.g. the parent comment is downvoted), it makes me think they might not care that much after all.

The crux of the matter is hidden in how the meaning of "caring" is defined. That's where opinions and perspectives diverge completely.

Here's a big question: How much change on a personal level are you willing to make to help curb climate change?

The trade offs and the compromises to be made are going to differ between groups and people. It all rides on social economic background, geographical location (where you live), mobility, opportunities, the life you've build for yourself.

Concrete example. Biden shutting down Keystone XL and the ensuing social upheaval:

https://www.vox.com/22306919/biden-keystone-xl-trudeau-oil-p...

In reality, several thousands of workers lost out on a seasonal / temporary work:

https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2021...

Disregarding the details of this particular case, it's an example that exactly points at the glaring challenge ahead: how this affects people directly.

Here you have a few thousand people directly having to figure out how to cover their living expenses, find an alternate livelihood to cover the loss of their job in the short run, adjusting their plans. This not a minor inconvenience, but quite an adjustment for many months to come. One can empathize on a personal level: losing out on a job - even if it's temp work - just sucks all round.

And that's just one of many uncountable individual trade offs people are asked or forced to make by their leadership. All risking to create resentment and lose support down the line.

In that regard, serious government officials and politicians do care, it's just that they can't make life-altering policy changes without consequences. The argument "If we don't change, climate change will end up costing us much, much more" is true to an extent, but hardly an argument you can readily use lest you want to lose support. People don't just look to you to enact policies regarding climate, they also look to you for leadership that ensures their lives remain relatively stable as well.

That's the catch-22 which humanity faces.

I perceive the downvotes as affirming the point I tried to make.

My comment wasn't in opposition of action to curb climate change. Read it again and you will notice that I don't take such a position. On a personal note, I'm quite concerned about climate change and it's consequences.

Being concerned about climate change, and being concerned about the social and economic impact of policies to curb climate change aren't mutually exclusive. On the contrary, both concerns are tied together.

The questions I asked aren't just faced by the readership of HackerNews who tends to have a shared view on the world and reality. All humans face them. The world contains far more views on life, morality, equability and so on. If you want to have a debate on governance, it's best to not ignore this very fact.

Maybe. Maybe not?

Take recycling for example. Basically well understood to be greenwashing by anyone whose done even a bit of research or thinking through the matter. But people who want to believe they are doing the 'right' things still insist on it. This is their way of 'making a difference' and it stops right after that. They recycle and the act of self identifying as having made a difference relieves the psychological pressure to do more or actually engage in making a real difference. Its a lazy way of psychological positioning oneself such that one is 'no longer a part of the problem'.

I'm not sure I put stock in the strategy of individual difference or 'being the change' if you will (although this might be a step beyond what you are making an argument for). I think we're in an era where our 'elected' leadership are so distant in regards of what their constituents are asking for relative to what needs to happen to make headway on an issue like climate change.

Climate change is an issue several orders of magnitude more difficult than something like covid was. Effectively, we need to undo the impacts of ~150 years of industrialization. The kinds of half-way solutions and psychological anesthetics we've been able to implement thus far are the definition of nibbling at the edges. I think fundamentally, unless we see a massive political shift in how we address these issues, we're stuck nibbling at the edges.

Recycling plastic is understood to be greenwashing for most types of plastic. And arguably recycling is a gateway behavior, for some, to more substantive changes, like eating less meat or just buying less crap.

I think just as arguably as recycling is a gateway behavior to more substantive changes, its just as likely to preclude engaging in more substantive changes. There's likely a masters thesis worth of work in our disagreement, but I see things like recycling and going vegetarian as an anesthetic that prevents engaging in additional action.

Going vegetarian is an anesthetic? It's the single biggest thing a meat eater can do to reduce their carbon footprint! What do you consider effective action if going vegetarian doesn't count? If you tell people nothing they do is adequate, odds are you aren't going to win them to your cause. I'm pretty sure most vegetarians are fighting for stronger action, not sitting on the sidelines saying, "nah, I've done my bit." The vegetarians are your shock troops, not sellouts.

Yes, I think vegetarianism as an individual response to climate change is largely an anesthetic. I think individual responses in general are done as anesthetic (you feel pressure to act, and so you do something within your purview to relieve that pressure). I have lost faith in the ideal of collective individualism's ability to move the needle on these issues based on my read of the previous 60 years of history. I also think its disingenuous and irresponsible to put the onus on individuals. I think that for collective action at the scale required to address what is happening to our global climate can only happen through government mandated changes to manufacturing and setting carbon standards at the point and process of production. If we want to deal with this, the answer is that meat needs to be much more expensive, and that expense needs to be borne by the producers. All products and consumption need to represent their real impact on climate. Arguing for individual vegetarianism is nibbling around the edge at best (see below) and a analgesic at worst. The pain of there being a problem needs to be persistent and long lasting for us to address the much more central issues at hand.

In the 1970's the US rate of vegetarianism was around 1%. In 2008, the rate was around 3%. In 2015, still around 3%. There is some 2018 data that says 4% (1). These surveys have margins of error, but lets be charitable and say they are spot on. Based on these data, we could expect to see a 20% adoption of vegetarianism by the year 2210. We could expect to see a 50% adoption by around 2600.

Simply put, individual action is not enough to make even a bug-splat on a windshields difference to this issue. Individuals who make personal decisions to eat less meat may be the shock troops and I do believe those are also the ones going above and beyond to make additional change happen. However, its not adequate. Its not enough. And I am arguing that advocating for solving or addressing this issue through individual change is counter-productive, because even being ridiculously charitable regarding rates of adoption, it simple wont be enough to even nudge the needle on climate change.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#:~:te....

If I'm reading your first paragraph correctly, you are making a claim that people who care about individual action will, generally speaking, stop at that and go no further because they think their work is done. That is a bit baffling to me and does not resonate with my personal experience. Is this a feeling or do you have anything to back it up?

Secondly, you flippantly reject recycling as greenwashing and leave it at that. Even if I accept this claim (time to stop recycling aluminum), what about other activities? Why wouldn't it be helpful to convince your friends to think about where they spend their money? Note for example how many more vegan protein options there are at the grocery store or restaurants now compared to even 5 years ago. Capitalism responds to consumer demand.

If I know that certain types of fish are way over-fished, should I just say "individual change doesn't do much until we get the government involved, so oh well, let's eat it anyway"? What about growing more of your food (perhaps a community garden) or trying to produce less waste? To me, it's better to act, and also show my friends and family my actions, so maybe one of them can do it and show their friends, and so on, so that ideas about e.g. sustainability permeate throughout society. Only then do they make it to the political domain.

All I see is criticism but no alternative given in return, so I'm curious what your view is. How do you think can we accomplish a "massive political shift in how we address these issues"? My opinion is that large-scale cultural change must start at an individual level, and it starts with individuals who actually do what they believe should be done, because people in general respond more by seeing action rather than only hearing ideas.

I think I addressed most of your issues in my response to DFHippie above, but I think I can at least address your more specific issues. To be clear, my central issue is with putting the onus on individuals to make the difference. I don't see sufficient evidence to suggest that individual voluntary collective action is capable of making a difference in regards to global carbon emissions, and I think that communicating so is not appropriate. I see it as largely misguided virtue signalling that is largely counter productive.

>My opinion is that large-scale cultural change must start at an individual level

I formerly held this belief, but I do not hold this belief currently. As far as I've seen, large-scale cultural change appears to be most readily demonstrated through forced coercion, systematic changes to the central governments, and massive advances in technology. Its a nice idea that we can all be the change we want to see and that we can change the world that way. I haven't seen evidence of it in my lifetime. Individual collective actions in the forms of protest movements have largely failed to accomplish their goals (Seattle 99, Protests against the war in Iraq/Agh, Occupy, Hong Kong, BLM). Things aren't getting better, they're largely getting worse, and those who are predisposed to take action keep focusing on types and modes of action which are demonstrated to be ineffective (advocating for people to individually become vegetarian, as opposed to finding ways of gaining power either within or over the system). People take to these modes of action because they're accessible.

I can stop eating meat. I can recycle. I can not eat some about to go extinct fish. My argument is that individual action doesn't appear to be making any difference at all. There is effectively no reduction to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere based on the % of people who have adopted vegetarianism in the previous 60 years. Arguing that people should, as individuals, go vegetarian to protect the environment, is like arguing that we should turn a fan on while the room is on fire because its getting hot in here.

I agree with you that individual change shouldn't be the only or the end goal -- anyone selling this idea is wrong or potentially malicious (e.g. corporations selling the idea of plastic recycling), and if that is your central issue, then I think we're mostly on the same page. We need to have changes at the governmental level and hold corporations responsible. Things like taxing negative externalities and legislating forms of extended producer responsibility seem like musts to me.

What doesn't sit with me is negativity toward the idea of individual action. Individual change is often simply a side effect of believing in something dearly. It's quite alien to me that one could feel strongly enough about an issue to fight for it at a political level, and at the same time not at least attempt to live and act according to those beliefs. The two go hand in hand in my world view, and I think both are needed. And those who originate and begin the spread of radical ideas, long before they make it to the political layer, almost surely were already acting according to those ideas.

So I do see -- and I think agree with -- your broader point, but unfortunately, I'm not sure how to actually gain this power within the system that you mention. What does that look like? What are the steps?

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