“If we all just conserve enough…”
Flying, for example, emits 2% of global emissions. That’s 100,000 flights a day, every day.
We’ve just spent over 2 decades generating at least 40% of our electricity with coal. The carbon footprint of that was incredible.
While we’ve been waiting for solar and wind to replace it…
We simply cannot continue to wait for other, more emission-intensive actors, to act first.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
I think we're doomed, mostly because too many people want to believe we can fix this without losing quality of life, and won't accept anything less than that.
Oh well.
It couldn't hurt. If people put more effort into reducing their carbon footprint and being mindful of the carbon externalities of their lifestyle they'd also probably vote for people and pay money to companies who seek to reduce the carbon footprint of industry and government too.
We have to care before anything will get done.
You are worrying about subtracting 0.000000000001 from the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
Telling people not to fly isn’t a solution
[update]
Anyway, I see my comment isn’t understood again. Enjoy another decade of incredible emissions.
I’m sure sooner or later people will finally get it.
Those windmills are still coming!!!
The hierarchy of the three R's is 1) reduce 2) re-use 3) recycle. That's for a reason. No need to manage consumption that never took place. Like the agile mantra, maximise the work not done.
There are several reasons why people focus on flying:
- 2% globally, but distributed very unequally over population
- much of flying can be prevented, most of it is elected (you can video conf that meeting or go on holiday locally, you can't not heat your house)
- flights are trending up, when we should be trending down (and are managing in other areas)