Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

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We is my family with me as one of the primary decision makers.

Show me a significant percentage of the population that would throw down five figures or more for an amorphous concept of “its better for the world” without any specific benefit to themselves. The civil rights movement and even local environmentalism is definable and it’s obvious to see how capital impacts outcomes that people want.

The micro-optimization of me using switching to electric stove does not register on any discernible metric and makes my own life worse. The same would be true if every household in the country did the same thing. It would reduce emitted CO² by 0.025% for significant one time and ongoing cost. Every household.

I would argue the market did decide to support the Civil Rights movement and there was obvious benefit for minimal cost to most. Civil Rights was a bottom up movement. Electrification is extremely top down at the moment.

>The micro-optimization of me using switching to electric stove does not register on any discernible metric

Switching from a gas stove? It absolutely does register, much more so in your household air quality but also it helps deprecate fossil fuel infrastructure which can have a big effect everywhere.

Gas infrastructure is notoriously leaky. A few houses switching away from gas stoves may not do much, but a neighborhood switching would cause a bunch of pipes to be shut off and emptied, reducing baseline direct methane emissions into the atmosphere, which have an outsize effect on climate change compared to the CO2 emitted by burning of the methane in a stove. First a household, then a neighborhood, then a town, etc. and eventually all those leaky pipes get shut off.

The long-tail effects of small optimizations like that can be surprisingly significant, rarely linear, and often non-obvious.

>I would argue the market did decide to support the Civil Rights movement and there was obvious benefit for minimal cost to most. Civil Rights was a bottom up movement.

Yes, it was definitely a bottom-up movement, resisted by the market and political establishment vehemently, until the cost of protest and other disruption made resistance no longer viable.

Similarly, big players in the fossil fuel industry are still fighting any attempts at change. We can work to hold them accountable via institutions while still trying to make small changes on a personal level.

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