No car > skipping flight > buy green energy > Get a electric car > diet.
https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/four-lifestyle-choi...
Telling consumers to cut back on X is essentially passing the back and making consumers feel bad without actually addressing the bulk of emissions.
The leverage over this, and all other conveniences, rests squarely with the companies offering them. People choose out of what's available on the market, not from the space of possible offerings.
That's the point of legislation: when the free market doesn't solve something, you add rules and enforce them. That's why food products must be edible and you wouldn't ask consumers to research and pick the right ones.
Politicians write legislation, and are elected by the people. If the people are unwilling to sacrifice any amount of their comfort then they won't elect politicians who will make them. And let's not kid ourselves, forcing industry to be more green will come at a cost to everyone: things will be more expensive, less readily available, and possibly of lower quality.
Amazon knows this, and thus won't stop offering it. Consumer Responsibility isn't the whole picture, but it is part of it.
Pollution-based taxes is the only realistic solution to the problem IMO, but they seem far away from being implemented anywhere.
Although I am not certain it would be a good thing. It is my understanding that delivery services like USPS, UPS, Amazon, etc. are better for emissions than making little trips to the store. Its dozens or hundreds of deliveries aggregated into a single highly optimized trip that keeps many other people off the road. If you give people the convenience of having it within a day or two, it may actually save entire round trips to the store. Without it, I think you have more cars on the road with more emissions.
There could be some good in more incentives around Amazon Day deliveries. Where all your goods show up on the same day each week. Reduced packaging and potentially reduced emissions. It would actually be cool of they did something and produced routes, where each neighborhood gets the same day, rather than individuals get to pick and change their own. That might make some decent impact. But you still have to convince people to wait a week.
Although that is not getting into the consumerism that Amazon fuels, and the extra plastics and trash that are produced because of it. Which are bad. But that I don't think you can put that entirely on Amazon, that's a society problem.
My comment was less about the particulars of 2-day delivery, and more about the general problem of punting the responsibility to consumers for things they're structurally unable to affect. The concept of "voting with your wallet" is one of the biggest modern-day scams.
Again, the things you mention are putting the onus on the consumer and are relatively small.
Everything consumers and non-industrial businesses do accounts for only 13% of global emissions. The entire global agriculture system accounts for only 10% of emissions and of that, 80% occurs during the production stage.
By contrast, concrete alone is 8% of global emissions. Forestry is 10%. Steel production alone is 9% of all emissions. Simply producing these base products creates more emissions than absolutely everything consumers do. Energy production is 25% and of that, industrial producers use most of it.
Right, but reducing consumption has knock-on effects across the board. Less need for ocean shipping when we demand fewer non-local goods, less need for concrete and steel when we build less stuff with it, etc.
> Everything consumers and non-industrial businesses do accounts for only 13% of global emissions.
Until you account for how many industries would exist if there were no consumers for their products. This whole argument stinks of trying to push the blame away from ourselves, just like the corporations are doing. We are all responsible for this, but we're all too self-centered to ever do anything about it because our comfort is much more important to us than the future of the world.
but all these things... serve consumers. Container chips contain goods that people buy, that required resource extraction and transport.
Can industry exists without consumers? If you don't buy any cars then you have an impact. If you don't buy a new laptop/phone each year you have an impact on electronic industry. If you don't order online a 1$ gadget daily you have an effect.
On the other side of the table, the choices made by the industrial players have immediate, large scale impact. A single board can decide to shut off some of the operations - stop making a gadget, stop making 100 different models of the same thing to try and segment the market, etc. - and, while they will have to convince dozens of other influential people to approve, if they succeed, the effect will be immediate and greater than a million consumers voluntarily changing their purchasing patterns.
No raindrop is responsible for the flood eh? This is why the problem will never be dealt with.
Indeed. Have you ever seen meteorologists appealing to raindrops? Have you ever seen a hydrologist counting water in fraction of CCs? A flood management system where individual droplets mattered?
No, a flood is a bulk event. It's managed like a system, using means with leverage over whole flows. Measurement starts with cubic meters. Nobody gives a damn about single raindrops, they're immaterial.
Same applies here. Focusing on regular individuals, and trying to get them to change their life style one by one, against the gradient of economic incentives controlling all of our lives, is like trying to pluck individual raindrops from rushing flood water. It's insane to even try. The answer is in redirecting the water stream; the droplets sort themselves out.
> This is why the problem will never be dealt with.
No, the problem will never be dealt with for as long as we focus on attempts to brow-beat everyone into self-sacrifice - to which people naturally react by ignoring the beating and resenting the beaters.
And if people are unwilling to make sacrifices, and people elect their government, then who will make the changes?
Similar, don't buy shit you don't need, do a bit of effort to research if maybe you can "sacrifice" a bit of money to buy a greener product or that will be shipped from a closer location etc. The industry is burning fuel to give you the shit you want, for you whims , you can't just blame them.
Correct, but now imagine you have a large number of individuals not only 1 .
Have you seen just this last week the Blizard/Activision responding to just individual action??? If just a random dude would have protested they would have done nothing, but when "influencers" and communities got involved shit happened, those bastards lost money and they had to do something.
You are the customer of the transports industry, you live in a concrete and steel building, you buy the devices made with extracted lithium or gold, power generators are running for every one of those … and for heating your house.
The problem is difficult because no one is responsible, but our entire civilization as such is responsible.
Yeah, we could probably make marketing people accountable for over consumerism. But they are just materialization of the ugly side of our civilization.
[1] I'm not saying that organic food helps climate, but it captures a similar idea. People complain that industrial food production is bad because of pesticides/hormones, organic mostly solves these problems, but people strangely aren't taking up on it.
That's not quite true. Individual action leads to societal change. Climate change will never be treated as an emergency until we believe that it is, and until it makes us change our individual behavior to show that it is. The other problem is that this behavior change needs to start at the top. We need to see that our elected leaders are treating this like an emergency. Unfortunately that will never happen because of a certain political party in the US that ignores science and delights in human misery.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/carbon-footprint-climat...
Psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley tested this exact scenario in a now-classic study. Participants filled out a survey in a quiet room, which suddenly began to fill with smoke (from a vent set up by the experimenters). When alone, participants left the room and reported the apparent fire. But in the presence of others who ignored the smoke, participants carried on as though nothing were wrong.Industrial is the largest energy consumer by sector, but doesn't pale in comparison to transportation, commercial and residential. If anything C19 has brought residential up to industrial levels.
And the category of buying shiny new stuff is missing. It's a big part of consumer-influencable emissions, though it's admittedly even harder to make a significant impact on than ditching cars after you bought your essentials second-hand (where possible/reasonable of course). Pushing for products to be produced in a climate-neutral fashion (voting with your wallet) would definitely be something though.
Edit: wait, Sweden. How is space heating not on that list? Surely where the majority of the Swedes live is not too cold for heat pumps with perhaps a bit of aid from pure electrical heat creation for a few days per year, is it?
[0] https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/drimage/1120/630/4832/fourc...
"Cumulative emissions from descendants, decreases substantially if national emissions decrease."
So doing all the other ones actually lowers that one.
And even then it only makes sense if no-one else has more kids to compensate, so it's a personal action that will cut your personal carbon, but like most things in this area not something that works unless we all do it (globally)
Why would we have to reduce the population below a number which is sustainable? Nobody is advocating that.
The actual number could be fine tuned through tax breaks. Give childless couples an X% tax break. Single child families a Y% tax break. 2 child families no tax break. 3 child families a tax penalty. 4 child families a larger penalty.
I really don't see the problem here? It's not like having a large population is in itself a noble goal that makes life better for people.
We don’t know how to run economies without young people. Look at the demographic issues in Japan, and lesser extent now in China.
Only if you assume the average is two children per couple and a replacement reproduction rate, which doesn't fit the reality I know. We have a huge population in the billions precisely because that's not what is going on.
If we drop to something below exponential growth rates, this is not a tragedy.
Humans tend to be on their own barring social pressures carbon neutral. The biggest expenses being food and water, if these aforementioned practices are applied. It gets even better if these young can work to reduce the impact of the warming.
We'll need a lot of manpower to pull off the necessary changes. Just due to the scale of it. Well educated people too. We're on at least one to two generations of lag in education related to physics, chemistry, agriculture, material science, civil engineering, process engineering, general ecology, social engineering... And the old will start to wear down and think in old patterns.
Additionally further down the list is "live together in higher density" and "buy locally made things" bits.
Your second sentence is an overreach. The natural death rate in the United States is about 0.9% of the population. [1]
[1]. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...
If the natural death rate is 0.9%, the population would decline by about 9% each decade.
The drop doesn’t have to go to 50% - just down to whatever the sustainable limit is.
> how do you stop all people on earth from having children without a world war?
I’m not sure that even a world war would achieve that. And again, it’s not necessary or desirable to go to that extreme. If the goal is sustainability, we just need to rightsize the population for sustainability. The actual population depends on the prevailing per capita emissions from whatever energy technologies we are using at any given time. The more carbon neutral the technology, the higher the population can be sustained, at least with respect to greenhouse gases.
To reduce the birth rate, rather than force everyone to stop, we could just reward those who are willing with tax breaks. X% tax break for zero children. Y% tax break for 1 child. 0% tax break for 2 children. And extra taxes for >2 children.
I'd disagree on the facts though. There's already such a wild difference in carbon intensity between two humans, that it would be ridiculous to suggest that the first step would be to remove humans rather than the activities that make that difference (and are sometimes wasteful, inefficient or counterproductive)
Coal electricity is 60% of emissions. Aviation is less than 5%. How is skipping a flight that highly ranked of you are burning a ton of carbon just being at home (if you have coal fired power).
Actual rankings have to be energy mix dependent.
So even though aviation is a small part of it all, it is one of the individual actions able to have outsized impact, usually for leisure or at least often for non-essential reasons.
I live in Southwestern Ohio and get probably 75% of my power from coal. My pot of coffee emits far more CO2 than someone in Portland, who gets 0% from coal and most of their power from hydro. It's the same pot of coffee. Our cost of energy is similar and our standard of living is similar.
Where you get your power greatly affects how much CO2 you emit doing the exact same things. All energy is not created equal.
There are two huge barriers to doing anything about this problem. The first is denialists and those with vested interests in fossil fuels promoting denialism. The second is well-intentioned people who understand that there is a problem over-complicating the issue, promoting misunderstandings, or promoting the idea that this can't be solved without massive decreases in standard of living.
The latter, which I term "abstinence based environmentalism" by analogy with abstinence-based sex ed, will work about as well as politely telling teenagers not to have sex. If you tell people they need to become poorer to save the planet, they'll ignore you... especially if they are already poorer than you in which case you look like a hypocrite.
This problem is actually pretty simple. The following steps won't solve it 100% but they'll go pretty far.
(1) Phase out coal for electricity generation in favor of... almost anything else except maybe oil shale.
(2) Push electric vehicles, not because all EVs categorically emit less carbon than gasoline cars but because it's a hell of a lot easier to replace a few point source power plants than it is to replace a vast fleet of millions of internal combustion engines. (That and your typical EV is indeed better... even if your electricity is 100% coal an EV is generally no worse than an ICE car due to the superior efficiency of large power plants and the high embodied energy of gasoline.)
(3) Continue to subsidize renewable energy and grid-scale storage.
(4) At least stop shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants before renewables are in place to replace them, and at best put some serious funding behind next-generation nuclear efforts. Fusion is also grossly under-funded. Ignore the "it'll always be N years away" idiots. There has been substantial progress even with very limited funding available.
There is no point in quibbling about small contributors like aviation (<5%) while we are still burning shitloads of coal and coal is far easier to replace than jet fuel. You don't solve a problem like this by making the solution maximally inconvenient.
The biggest gains to be had are obviously systemic, and what I do as a consumer is far more limited in its scope and impact. I still limit my flights, no longer attend in-person conferences, try to travel more local, because what else am I going to do? I'm aware this is like putting out a cigarette when the whole town's already on fire, but I can't deal with the dissonance otherwise. It's still an individual luxury that can have an oversized impact compared to everything else I do.
Advocating for it is not going to be sufficient at all, but it's still the most impact I can have when all the big stakeholders who have to fix their powergrid are not even in countries I live in.
> It's still an individual luxury that can have an oversized impact compared to everything else I do.
ive ridden on many long intercontinental flights where a huge amount (almost half) of seats were unfilled..
So no, your decision does not immediately affect the number of planes flying, but if many people fly less the net effect will be fewer planes in the air after some time delay.