My wife is taking a course in environmental architecture, and the information she's been sharing is nothing short for terrifying. Worse, the messaging about "doing your part" seems embarrassingly naive now.
Yes and no.
I would even go as far as to say that nihilism of no value in doing the right thing has been one reason we have reach this point -- we have lost a lot of collective action because of the sentiment that nothing you will do will matter. Collective action requires individual action.
The major industries don't just pollute for the sake of it, they respond to demand for which we individually share a part of the blame.
I can choose to eat steak from pastures made from burned Amazon rainforest, or I can choose more local, less carbon-heavy food. I can choose bottled spring water, or use my tap.
I can choose to take shorter showers.
I can choose to buy a smaller car and rent when I only really need the horse-power to drag a trailer.
I can choose to take public transport a bit more often.
I can choose to buy fast-fashion and replace my clothes often, or I can repair or buy repair services from a local vendor.
And so on.
Not all options are open to everyone, but like no raindrop is responsible for a flood, no person is responsible for anthropogenic climate change.
I believe a large part of the blame should go to advertising.
Advertising works or it wouldn't exist. And it stimulates consumerism by definition.
Personal opinion, but kill advertising and you solve a lot of problems.
It seems to me like one could use the same argument regarding slave labor, but somehow we manage to force companies to comply there.
Shorter showers make basically no difference to carbon footprint unless your water is heated by an antique. Our electric water heater is less than 10% our power bill, and most of that goes into standby mode.
Smaller cars matter more than the above, but are basically just pissing into the wind. Halving transportation CO2 per mile won't be anywhere close enough to keep us under 2.5C.
Taking public transit a bit more often also doesn't matter. What percentage of your CO2 footprint is it reducing?
Avoiding fast-fashion mostly matters for microplastics (the clothing industry's carbon footprint isn't that big), but I doubt clothes were ever a significant fraction of the plastic you throw away.
Summarizing, if everyone did everything you said, we'd still be completely screwed. We need infrastructure level fixes instead:
- ban power plants that emit CO2
- set up international protections for timberland, and sanction / bomb any country that ignores them (cutting down rainforests should be treated in the same way as terrorist attacks)
- add a $2 per gallon atmospheric carbon capture tax to gasoline. This means that, for every gallon of gas sold, we'd sequester the emissions of two gallons worth of gas. It also means EVs and hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell, and other technologies will rapidly become more popular
- fund public transit (busses and trains) at the same level as the road network
- tax the crap out of plastic so that natural fibers (and paper bags) are economically viable. This'd less than double the price of stuff.
No individual can pull any of those levers except via political means or via technological innovation.
Rising average weight of cars around proofs that people do not care about saving environment. Safety first?
But I wouldn't blame consumers for buying what manufacturers make. Individual never has significant impact on environment as corporations does.
So first we need to stop with hypocrisy to make people believe in narration of helping our future.
On top of that, making a choice oneself inspires hope and commitment. If you make the hard choice, sacrifices near-term comfort for the common good, cognitive dissonance rewards you. Likewise, if you make a morally lazy choice, cognitive dissonance soothes your conscience and makes it harder to choose otherwise in the future.
If consumers didn't demand so much cheap energy we would have less coal burning power stations, for example.
People fund corporations, we have to pay for alternatives which are usually a significantly higher cost that we refuse to accept.
Narratives that corporations that are responsible for a majority of pollution are BS. The corporations are at the mercy of our individual wallets.
I do think it's a government's role to unify and lead people through this. Provide quality alternatives, support offramping, etc. Without this essential cultural contract it just won't work.
Individual effort is only meaningful if it's coordinated and a majority of people buy into it. But we can't get that leadership behind the effort if we, the people, just keep voting it out.
So while it's admirable to individually "do your part" we know for a fact the overwhelming majority of people don't actually give a flip enough to prioritize the planet and work together.
Raindrops do contribute to floods, but you need coordination to get there.
This is demonstrably false. I'd posit that basically no lasting societal changes have been implemented by large scale individual sacrifices.
In a similar vein, as this has recently been in the news and on HN a lot lately, when it comes to the obesity epidemic, we've been talking about "individual responsibility" and "diet and exercise" for literally many decades and we've only seen global waistlines expand year after year. The technological advancement of semaglutide is literally the first advancement that many obesity researchers believe will actually make a dent in overall obesity.
- A union is not a piece of paper, it is a group of people who individually joined, and then as individuals participated in the collective strikes for improved labour conditions. Early movements included significant violence against these individuals who often kept on fighting.
- An abolitionist movement is not an abstract concept, it contained multitudes of individuals willing to fight for a cause and route slaves to safety and lasting change. Many died doing the right thing.
- Women's suffrage was not just an idea, it required many individual women and men to stand up and take action. Narges Mohammadi chose individual responsibility for her cause and so do many others, and they are paying a heavy price.
- Marriage equality for LGBTQ+ is currently happening around the world because individuals take collective action, often with significant sacrifices and death brought on these minorities.
The power of collective action comes from the multiplication of individuals, not just the sum of them.
Meanwhile at least 95% of the world population lives from paycheck to paycheck (immediate existential threat versus long term threat) and doesn't have the financial means to buy solar panels, EVs, etc., but also more durable items instead of cheap stuff from China.
When contraction occurs, if you’ve planned properly, it’ll be news you read about, not impact on your life.
TLDR Optimize for the expectation of persistent volatility.
The chances that a Western government will leave you alone during all of this are virtually zero.
We're still talking about Humans, right?
We are so screwed.