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.
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 will never move a river by asking each drop, you build a dam.
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.
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.