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Comment by webprofusion | Hacker News Reader

This is why being a discerning consumer matters on a global level, eventually. Vote with your wallet and take the financial hit if you have to. Your choices today will matter tomorrow, even if it only matters to your kids.

If we all take the easiest path it will also be the slippery slope to the bottom.

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It's easy to demand this if you have enough resources/money to spare. Given that the wealth gap widens from year to year, this strategy does not work in the long run. People simply don't have that money to spare. The same issue already exists regarding cheap mass produced food. You only hear privileged people talking about more expensive choices, because they can. The bigger part of population buys the cheap food, because they have no other way to feed their family...

Your arguments are that it doesn't work in the short term, not in the long term. If you don't do this now then what is a choice of convenience eventually does turn into a choice of necessity. Wherever possible resist with your wallet. Resist with your words. Resist with your choices. Don't find ways to argue that you can't do something, find ways to do as much as you can.

No worries, as someone without a car who only uses public transport and walks daily to work, there aren't really many people with less CO2 consumption then me. In fact, I find your call for resistnce pretty hilarious.

That doesn't change my original argument. Calling for the rich to vote with their wallet doesn't make a difference when it comes to daily consumables. What the poor and middle class is able and willing to afford makes the difference. Missing infrastructure is also an important factor. You can call for more public transport and bicycle use as much as you want... Those outside of cities are pretty much stuck with what they have. And if they aren't wealthy, they can't by an EV either.

All in all, I am fed up with this hypocritical high-nose sort-of advice. It shows a general disregard for the day-to-day problems of most people.

Also worth trying to steer your career towards something meaningful. I get at least some satisfaction that I spend my days trying to make heat pumps better and cheaper

Bill Gates calls it the ‘green premium’ which I thought was a good way of highlighting that a green option is often there for those able and willing to afford it.

....and stop buying rubbish from China, who dont care about the environment?.

If you live in Europe, precious little is domestically produced (ground-to-consumer) any more. We depend on South and East Asia for almost everything, increasingly including raw materials (steels, plastics, etc) for the tiny amount of secondary manufacturing we still do.

Going without (or reusing, recycling) isn't a wholly harmful strategy but it does take a lot of willpower.

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