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Comment by 0x000000001 | Hacker News Reader

Climate change can't be fought on a personal level. That's just propaganda to shift responsibility onto the individual consumer and there are plenty of bleeding hearts out there that eat it up and conjure up guilt for something out of their control on a macro level

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>That's just propaganda to shift responsibility onto the individual consumer

But it's the individual consumer that's ultimately responsible for all of the emissions? Corporations aren't emitting carbon for their own enjoyment.

Individual consumers? I shouldn't think that's true

> Just 100 of all the hundreds of thousands of companies in the world have been responsible for 71% of the global GHG emissions that cause global warming since 1998, according to The Carbon Majors Database, a report recently published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)...

Fine, but a cultural shift away from eating meat for 3 meals a day would have a big impact and how does that happen except at an individual level?

> how does that happen except at an individual level

I can see changing subsidies around to make meat more expensive as a matter of public policy being more effective at changing individual behavior than trying to convince them on moral grounds.

And I can see making meat a luxury item only attainable by the wealthy having... unintended consequences.

It's not like meat was always cheap, it probably does more harm than good from a public health standpoint. In countries without subsidized steak people just have a different diet, use the meat for flavor, not calories.

This may be true when it comes to consumption, but we must definitely do something as individuals for anything to change systemwide. Participating in direct action for system change is still worth doing as an individual, where it's a contribution to a collective movement.

It won't happen by buying different stuff, but by spending our time working on projects with others that are not supporting the current system but are building a different one that is not as destructive for the climate.

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