What Are You Willing to Sacrifice to Stop Climate Change?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
and throw responsibility on ordinary people to a completely unwarranted degree. Exxon Mobil, Saudi Aramco et al have plenty of reason to love the notion of hundreds of millions of individual millenials and others feeling guilty because they used a straw for their soft drink today, or asked for a plastic bag during their grocery shopping.
Because a great number of influencer, celebrity and media types also know that exhortations of this individual kind get them much more brownie points and media attention, they're complicit in the same misplaced guilt crusade. Posting on social media about how some oil corporation should dump 20% less carbon into the atmosphere doesn't have nearly the same level of pop culture trendiness or immediate satisfaction of making someone comment about how they'll change their ways.
As far as I'm aware that started with a picture of a turtle being affected by plastic ocean waste.
Getting rid of non-biodegradable disposable items has always been a good idea, since they are designed to be thrown away. And the best way to do that has always been global industry regulation and producer responsibility after initial awareness raising.
However, the only context it gets mentioned in now is by people saying that its not going to stop climate change (which it was never claimed to) and that individual action is pointless.
It's like theres a whole industry dedicated to undermining people's faith in reasonable efforts to fix actual problems. And since their main weapon is subverting human biases they can attack from both sides at once.
So banning disposable plastic straws is at once a regulatory overreach of communist-hippies and also a conspiracy by big oil to continue polluting because all those stupid people think straws are the problem when really its foreigners or liberals or environmentalists or whatever other convenient scapegoat can be found.
Basically anyone angry about how were dealing with climate change and directs that anger at anyone other than the fossil fuel extraction industry and their enablers in the media and politics strikes me as super suspicious.
Corporations are effectively sociopathic and this feels like the stage after the denials and the minimizations in a typical narcissistic abuse cycle "well if it is happening and if it is a big deal then it's your fault" and hoping you forget all the times they denied it was a problem or that it wasn't a big deal.
If not everyone, I'm not willing to sacrifice anything at all.
I think a more charitable way to interpret the parent post is that they want a good faith effort made to enforce the mandates, without requiring that those efforts be 100% effective at achieving compliance.
Personally I think that if someone cares about an issue which requires collective action, then their moral obligation is only to contribute to the solution more than the median person. Of course it is impossible for most people to do better than the median, but if most people pursue this goal, it would bring the median down, while creating a democratic mandate for reducing the maximum.
People will also, I reckon, begin to realize that a lot of the externalities from CO2-emitting activities (car noise, pollution, traffic and lack of exercise, for example) are things that they won't want to return to.
You hear a lot about flying to holidays being something we have to give up, but that seems so flagrantly designed to annoy people that I feel the source is more likely to be climate change deniers than actual environmentalists.
Are holidays really a big thing? I know flights are technically hard to decarbonise today, but I don't think I've ever seen numbers suggesting they're a big priority compared with the low hanging fruit or that individual action is the best way to solve it.
But leisure travel is an extremely low-hanging fruit when compared with e.g. food, isn't it? Nobody has to take a vacation by plane, but everybody has to eat.
The tourist industry is pretty wasteful and similar to the fashion industry: it's pretty much entirely unnecessary luxury. Compare that to e.g. concrete manufacturers or farms, they're not only necessary, they're pretty far from the top of the pyramid: you'll have a very hard time without them.
No idea on their specific methodology etc. but I do believe that the general principle of using financial tools to find the best solutuons to problems is sound. But that seems like a sacrifice thats roughly on par with buying a toaster and likely is immaterial in the context of a vacation halfway around the world.
But I'd guess the kind of person that wants someone to fix their holidays personally before they fix the toaster industry (or the agriculture industry that makes the bread they toast) is likely to reject such a solution for some reason as it makes solving climate change a bit too easy, and applying market forces and capitalism to replace fossil fuels is just as much of a threat as government regulation of the same thing. Is there any solution that they're going to like if the direct result is to reduce the wealth, power and influence of the oil and gas industry?
But in The Netherlands some government officials have taken the point of view that natural gas is Bad, and we should all pay lots of money to move to heat pumps and similar in order to get rid of it.
The sad thing is that most people in The Netherlands are also lied to by those same politicians about how "green energy" actually is created. For instance after years of planting thousands of windmills (both on land and on sea) the wind-energy electricity generated is still around 1% (I'm actually being generous).
Similarly many farming fields have been converted to now have solar panels, and many many houses have them by default. Same here, total energy created: about 1%.
What government still calls "renewables" is biomass. Which is actually the burning of trees. This is massively bad for nature because those trees are the one thing that actually converts that bad co2 to breathable air again.
Real renewable energy we get from imports from countries like Norway: water power. Around 8%.
But, here is the fun part: the vast majority of our electricity comes from, you guessed it, burning natural gas.
People that invest €10K to have a heat pump and solar power still use a very large amount of grid-electricity, which comes from burning natural gas.
What do you mean by this? Natural gas is another fossible fuel, it's far from being "eco friendly". It's better than coal or oil but that's about it.
But until the day that they are, natural gas is the best one we have. Pushing people to move away from it just because its Bad, doesn't make sense. That would simply move from you burning gas to some electricity company burning gas. With huge economic impact in the mean time for all those that have to buy really expensive heat pumps.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_Netherland...
Here is another lobbying company that has nice numbers too;
https://www.nvde.nl/nvdeblogs/hernieuwbare-energie-voor-het-...
> Het verbruik van hernieuwbare energie is in 2020 met bijna 20% gestegen. Daarmee is hernieuwbare energie nu goed voor ruim 11% van ons totale energieverbruik. De groei zit vooral in de sterke stijging van wind en zon, en in meer inzet van vaste biomassa.
Which states that the TOTAL renewable energy is 11%, with biomass being the majority.
Now, both sources can't be right, can they?
It lines up neatly with your initial 1% claim for example, except you specifically claim that it's 1% of electrical generation, not total energy.
Worth noting too that switching to renewables and electrifying actually reduce total energy, as more than half of it wasted as heat from combustion of fuels. Another popular statistical trick to make switching to renewables seem impossible.
Besides... Is CBD Statline really a lobbying group or are you just guessing that such groups are involved because it fits your narrative?
You might want to check your numbers on that. Nothing is over 100% efficient.
They pump the heat you know. From colder outside into warmer inside. And they use (electricity that is) the fraction of heat energy that they pump in.
So 100W electric heater gives you 100W of heat inside, but 100W heat pump can bring in 300W of heat from outside. So it's 300% more efficient at heating the inside of the house.
Gas is imported. Has been for decades.
Nothing in the sense of personal decision.
I would happily sacrifice most things if they were enforced at high enough levels to actually make a difference.
I would happily accept a ban on single USA plastics. I would happily accept a ban a few years out on gas cars. I would happily accept mandatory changes in packaging laws.
But I'm not going to torture myself for no gain to anyone by enforcing strict standards on myself that are so marginal to be totally meaningless in the bigger picture. I don't expect anyone else to either.
I figure we'll get sensible rules when the pain to the average person is strong enough that it's easier to accept that than whatever else we are dealing with and not a minute sooner.
Nice blame the voters....The solution for every problem (especially in the West) is a new tax. Why not just make some changes to existing laws to save the planet. Where you don't even need the voters. Firm up the building codes to create better and more efficient houses/condos/commercial properties. Encourage more work from home to cut down on the amount of traffic, outlaw coal power, no new drilling for oil unless you can capture the flare off, etc. I could think of 100 things that would make a bigger difference than a Bullshit Carbon Tax that our kakistocracy wants so they can get rich off of it. Do folks actually understand how little changes/tweaks to the stupid way most Americans live could make massive real world differences. Just discouraging lawns in places where they shouldn't be growing would reduce Carbon (mowing/care) and save 100's of billions of gallons of water (Texas, Arizona and any other hot dry state).
The arrogance of the following statement. Shifting the blame on us and constantly creating this Left vs Right bullshit.
>All of this leads to a difficult truth: The problem here lies not with the politicians, or even with the billionaires or oil companies. It lies with voters themselves, who recognize that climate change is a real problem but are not necessarily willing to sacrifice much of anything to tackle it.
The article also states this information is hearsay. I would want to see a more comprehensive and open look at voter preferences before drawing conclusions.
Avoid throwaway bags, packaging and utensils.
The carbon footprint of an ICE vehicle is heavily weighted towards burning its fuel (and transport/extraction of that fuel). The maintenance you mention during use is actually another area where EVs save both money, energy and carbon.
The carbon ratio tilts towards manufacturing as cars get better mpg, and EV have the equivalent mpg of 100+, but at the same time the total reduces since cars are on the road for about a decade on average.
At a societal level a shift to EVs (but also busses, bikes etc) is clearly better, but even at a personal level, a new car with better mpg than the existing one (so especially but not exclusively an EV) will pay off for that individual's carbon footprint.
So the best way to get there with market forces is predictably rising gas taxes and lowering incentives building up to a total ban. Which is what most countries are doing.
From what I can find it is far from clear and really depends on how old/inefficient the used car is and, most importantly, how much you drive.