Personaly I am with the farmers, why are we burning our farmers and industry on the fire of environmentalism when the future of the environment will be decided by developing countries, not us. There is a balance to be made here.
(By the way, those college-educated Westerners are also choosing to live smaller, use more public transport, drive fewer miles, invest in durable goods, insulate their homes, buy heat pumps and vote for parties that want to do something about industrial pollution. It's not all canvas shopping bag virtue signaling.)
Also, IMO, the changes need to happen at a governmental and corporate level. Individual people - which is where I was imagining you were thinking about when referring to incentives* - make a much smaller difference to AGW.
*was I wrong about that?
What incentive structures do you see working in this context?
In the end, the cost will wind up with individual people anyway. Industry will get subsidies and business funneled their way for the transition. On top, climate is a huge business - some sectors are salivating at the revenues to be made in the next decade or so - and those revenues will have to come from somewhere.
So, I don't think you can enact any policies on top with noticeable costs to individuals. There is also the question of how subsidies will be paid back - maybe a lot more countries need to create some sort of wealth fund for the investments needed and then distribute back some revenues? Maybe some higher minimum wage for work in climate? Not saying I have the solutions.
> There's a much simpler explanation: people are worried about the environment and global warming, so they are willing to try out a lot of different things that they think might help, but lo and behold, it turns out that some of those things actually help and others turn out not to...
It's not one or the other, it's both.
There's also the factor that people are more comfortable with changes that inconvenience others, but don't inconvenience them much; so there's often a major lack of consideration and empathy with the proposals. Couple that with religion-like moral urgency, and you get a lot of unnecessary conflict.
Religious-like penance and "I can't do anything about climate change, but you should" are polar opposites, though, so if you think that's a major factor you're arguing against the OP.
The point of religious penance is that it is very, very inconvenient to me (not others) while solving nothing. Refusing to buy fruit that is out of season because you worry about the CO2 from transportation is perhaps a good example, because it can be a major inconvenience but shipping is so efficient that it's not clear that it would have much of an effect.
The point of token adherence and kicking the can down the road is that it's all someone else's problem, as for example when people argue that gas furnaces (not stoves) or inefficient air conditioning should be illegal, which is fine by them because they have the money to buy a state-of-the-art system anyway and if it's too expensive for other people, that's their problem. Or, as in this story about the Farmers' protest party, stuff that inconveniences farmers but not them, though that's a very complex case.
But here is one of the possible foundations of my opinion:
- A graph of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa observatory:
- The simple, pure shape of that graph, which appears to still be accelerating, affects me profoundly. It makes me think of all of the slightly different graphs that people use to show some progress on climate change, from estimated emissions to temperature changes, and that their deepest meaning is just that they are ways to deny *this* chart.
It stands to reason that if it made people’s day to day life easier, people would likely already be doing it.
>Only useless solutions that let college-educated Westerners pat themselves on the back like paper straws, plastic bag bans, complaining about gas stoves, etc.
1. The average westerner pollutes significantly more than the average person in a developing country.
2. All of those “useless” solutions are really just low hanging fruit that doesn’t really cause all that much disruption to day to day life.
If not having plastic bags, straws, and gas stoves really causes that much distress, then you’re really living a life with very few problems.
That sounds incredibly arrogant. So the default is that the banhammer should be swung around at will unless it causes outright critical problems? OK, give up half of the things you enjoy for marginal gains.
And the gas stove campaign is pure hysteria. If gas stoves caused serious disease, we would have seen a massive population-wide correlation of gas stove use and disease much like we do in case of tobacco, lead, asbestos or alcohol consumption. Given that the gas stove is more than 120 years old and no pandemics of early deaths can be attributed to it, the whole thing may be just clickbait.
Where did I say that.
This is not just misleading but straight up wrong.
Sure, western nations don't dominate global population numbers (and are mostly shrinking too), but the United states alone emit TWICE the amount of CO2 compared to India, with 1/4 the population.
Just saying "the future of the environment is on you, India, China, Africa, since there is not much we Americans can do, there are just not enough of us" is sickeningly hypocritical.
Also, how are you going to convince ANY developing nation that struggles to lift their population out of poverty that paying for environmental protection is necessary, while you (as a rich westerner) sit on your ass?!
Sorry for the confrontational tone, but I feel I HAVE to correct this because it is an extremely popular sentiment ("we're already doing more than our part for the environment in the west, now it's on the Chinese/Indians/etc."), and this is completely unsupported by facts.
CO2 is only one metric of pollution. And as India is 4x the population of the US what difference will the amount of Nitrogen Dutch farmers use make once the Indians achieve a US style standard of living? Bugger all that’s how much. So they’re correctly asking why on earth they’re being put out of jobs over this at this time.
Of course fewer people have less influence on the outcome, but that is not an excuse to do less (per person) in the smaller group. India could just split into 2000 states and turn your argument straight around...
This is just not how collective obligation works, in the very same way that you absolutely CANT argue with your tax officials that "it doesn't really make a difference whether I pay" (or your village/city if they're small).
I just picked America as example because they're arguably the worst of the bunch in Co2/capita (except some rich tiny states like Luxembourg), so good on you for doing better than them (probably).
Also feel free to make an argument using different metrics for pollution, but I have strong doubts that you could change the conclusions-- also consider that climate change is precisely that big a problem because it is not quickly reversible at all.
Co2 is also a metric where you can get easily comparable numbers and those are already unfavorable even WITHOUT taking into account how much pollution is outsourced by wealthy nations (which is hard to quantify).
I'm flabbergasted. This is so wrong it hurts. Developed countries have BY FAR done the most to create and currently contribute to AGW. We have the moral responsibility to do the bulk of the work to fix it.