This is the problem. Putting so much of the burden on the consumer and hardly any on the manufacturers, companies and so on. Consumers contribute just a small percentage of the problem but are being asked to account for much more.
In the US at least, and especially the West Coast, things like SEER (HVAC efficiency) and CAFE standards (car fuel economy) have been steadily rising, at least until Republican officials push back. Building codes include better and better rules for renewable energy production, insulation, etc. In the private sector things like LEED encourage buildings to utilize better materials, passive heating and cooling, water management, etc. Those are all constraints on the manufacturers and companies. Where consumers are encouraged to change to newer appliances, grants usually help cover the costs of new fridges, LED lights, HVAC equipment, sprinklers, etc.
Heat pumps as a consumer phenomenon didn't even catch on until very recently, decades after regulations spurred market innovation.
Maybe it works differently in Germany, but here at least it seems like we go way out of our way to incentivize consumer behavior over decades instead of forcing through overnight changes.
Could it be a marketing issue, where governments and manufacturers making these iterative changes don't really broadcast them to the public at large, such that when the changes finally hit the average homeowner, they are still caught by surprise? To them it might seem like a sudden change even though it's been happening behind the scenes for years?
If Brits want to hear a Taylor Swift concert, and Swift's private jet crosses the Atlantic twice emitting 700 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the process - are those Swift's emissions?
Or have 900,000 concertgoers each emitted 7kg of CO2, equivalent to driving 2 miles?
What about if, instead of Taylor Swift tickets, we consider electricity? More consumption directly increases the power plant's emissions - but consumers can't control whether coal, gas, nuclear or solar supplies their power.
If you take the view that corporations' emissions are attributable to the corporation, not their customers - then corporations are much, much less green than consumers. And we'd need to focus more on emissions by giant corporations, and less on plastic straw bans.
The CAFE model seems to work for that. It doesn't really matter whether it's the driver or the car manufacturer, taxpayers front the regulatory research and costs, manufacturers moan and whine then eventually comply to some degree, consumers buy cars with slightly better mileage each year, over time things get better. Then Tesla comes around and makes electrification a reality, etc.
Similarly with the solar market, subsidies spurred investment and research and deployment and helped foster growth, until there is so much of it that (say) California's grid can hardly keep up, China saw the market and took it over, etc. These days it's a commodity. Government carrots do work, is all I'm saying.
You can create demands and markets through planned public investments.
Sometimes, though, we do blame fossil fuels companies, whether they're using tankers or oil rigs or pipelines. Sometimes those controversies can help spur better protections and safety regulations and whatnot, but at the end of the day your point stands: from a climatic standpoint the emissions are there whether we attribute it to a single company or a million individuals. Maybe the accounting is different and helps different political players, but the atmosphere doesn't care how we divvy it up.
IMO Taylor Swift flying in a private jet isn't that different than, say, OpenAI making a bunch of CO2 for a product that millions of people end up using, or Larian spending a bazillion CPU and GPU hours to make Baldur's Gate, or some politico flying back and forth to attend climate meetings. At the other extreme, Greta sails low impact and has great marketing, but that only goes so far. We still need everyday solutions that mid size companies and governments can implement on actionable timescales. That typically means low hanging fruits like more solar, more batteries, occasionally nuclear, incremental standards, etc. Is it enough? No, not nearly. But I think it's more than we've gotten from, say, Greenpeace or PETA. People generally respond better and faster to carrots than disciplinary punishments...
I actually chose that example partly because there's an immediately actionable lower-carbon substitute: flying first-class on a normal commercial flight.
But that same logic can apply for many people and our lifestyles... why not take the train across the country instead of flying? Why not arrange carpools to/from work, or take the bus and subway? Why not stop eating meat? Ride your bike more often? Turn up the AC by 5 degrees? It's just a losing battle... imo we're genetically disinclined to do things that may vaguely benefit the species as a whole over a period of 20 years when the alternative benefits ourselves in the here and now. Maybe we celebrate that sort of altruism precisely because it's so rare and difficult for most people to do.
That's why I think steering the market towards better alternatives using a not-so-invisible hand works better than trying to coerce (or even convince) people into behavior change.
Some people feel the whole "why not stop eating meat and ride a bike" narrative is PR by huge polluters like coal power plants and private jet owners, hoping to shift responsibility away from themselves.
I don't disagree that big fossil fuel companies and billionaires are evil. But their evil has the tacit (and often explicit) approval and support of millions, if not billions, of average individuals who value their own comforts and convenience more than our collective well-being. Sure, not everyone's like that, but enough are such that unpopular punitive climate programs don't really have a chance of surviving long enough to matter.
That's not a matter of blame accounting, just humans being humans, a much harder problem to solve...
Dua Lipa?
The real answer for this situation is that it doesn't matter. For the 70 (not 700) tons, flip a coin between assigning Swift an extra $14000 on her already expensive flight, or assigning each concertgoer a pence. Either way it's a trivial amount.
And the thing about climate change is that consumption is much more equal than financial wealth. A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less.
Agree that the problem with the investments of the wealthy driving climate change is consumer demand that needs to be destroyed (EVs, heat pumps, solar, factory farming protein, etc).
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f...
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi...
We need to shave co2 off everything, as if we were doing weight reduction to a bicycle.
Source and/or explanation?
We definitely should be funding research (because systems aren't good enough yet) into these systems because we're not acting fast enough and CCS has the advantage of acting on the lag effect. But this is no excuse to not also reduce emissions. They're coupled: we need less CCS the less we produce which is nice especially considering nuclear is a cheaper option than CCS at this point.
You will never move a river by asking each drop, you build a dam.
Found the millionaire coping with his excessive consumption.
No really, I don't own a car, don't fly, don't go on cruises, don't go on vacation three times a year any other way, live in a 50 sq m flat without anything but the most basic amenities. And you know why? Because I'm poor, that's why. Like most of Earths population. So don't try to tell me my carbon footprint is the same as Gordon Geckos, it simply can not be true.
That is just not true.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f...
There are many other sources.
> in the UK, the least wealthy half of the population accounts for less than 20% of final demand, less than the top 5% consumes.
You got this backwards. It's like trying to clean up a river by only picking up trash at its mouth. You're not going to do a great job.
Consumers can only buy what's available. Most people are too poor to make choices other than that on price. Capitalism can work great for price reduction but one way to do price reduction is quality reduction. If the whole non-luxury market is focusing on price reduction and the easiest way is to achieve that is quality reduction then guess what happens. On the other hand, if quality has to hold constant -- which happens when consumers are less price sensitive and won't go for a slightly cheaper option when competitor tries quality drop -- you have to research and build better and/or cheaper. BUT if most major players try the same strategy of quality reduction at the same time then consumers never get the chance to indicate to the market that they value quality.
> A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less.
Maybe don't guess and check first. We're on the internet, you don't have to respond immediately and state something that is verifiably false. While we don't have good refined data on specific jobs, there is strong correlation with wealth levels and specifically consumption rates. But if you're modeling a Wall Street banker as someone who works all day, takes the subway, sleeps, and never takes vacation then sure, that's lower. But don't confuse the mean and the median.
Edit: Taking our analogy from above: if all producers simultaneously have to do "x" then all consumers automatically also choose "x". This is where regulation can play a role since you can do things like "all cars must get at least 50mpg" or have a more market driven approach like "$100 fee per ton CO2eq" and use that fee to perform such actions like sequestration and/or research to make sequestration effective and cheap.
We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice. Especially for the rich who you rightly pointed out are the source of the problems we are trying to ameliorate.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. Markets aren't exclusively driven by consumers and such framing is incredibly naive. You can't buy the fruit that doesn't exist.
I want electricity, or more accurately I want to heat my home, wash my clothes, etc.
It is not my consumption that has caused us to continue subsiding oil and not investing properly in renewables for over half a century.
I understand why people cry that “corporations are the problem” but I can’t believe that deep down they believe it.
The only thing consumers could do is buy less, but life makes that rather hard. The companies that you are trying to absolve lobby to make that harder.
Spoiler alert, life is going to get rather hard for a whole lot of people over the next few generations because we’ve been ignoring “the personal responsibility theory of pollution.”
Between space heating, transportation, water heating, and cooking, about 42% of energy-related emissions are things that consumers have some control over in their homes. We have to decarbonize both the supply side (which is happening super rapidly with wind/solar) as well as the demand side (which is much harder because it requires coordinated action across millions of people). And we have to do this incredibly swiftly to keep a livable climate.
This is the attitude that shows that “fixing” climate change is doomed. Everybody can find somebody else who’s “worse” to blame the problem on and so they justify doing nothing themselves.