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Comment by nehal3m | Hacker News Reader

I do care. I see a species ending disaster hanging over the future. I recycle, I have solar panels, a heat pump, an EV (that I leave on my driveway whenever my bicycle will do the job). But the planet is being ruined by greed on an unfathomable scale and aside from doing what I can and voting for parties that see the problem, I feel like there’s not a god damn thing I can do about it.

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This consumer/suburbia-level checklist of individual eco merit is more of a scapegoating ritual than something that makes a difference. This is not a job for solar panel rebates. It’s more of a job for things like Extinction Rebellion; political demonstrations and activism that forces the issue. Which in turn (if successful) will lead to real organized work towards and ecological future. One where we are chipping in together rather than hunking down in our single-home bunkers with our plastic recycling and electric bicycles.

Although things like adoption of EVs does probably have a great positive impact on the local pollution levels.

I agree, you can’t shop your way out of political issues and joining a polity is probably the best thing you can do. Still, having to make a choice I’d opt for buying the more sustainable option.

You agree. Yet you keep repeating this cul de sac attitude of recycling and other single home nice to haves?

Simply miss me with these already-wise replies. That just means that your comments are something worse than naive.

The UN sustainability index once listed Cuba as the only sustainable economy. Another year it was Ecuador. Cuba might be eligible again because of the embargo. My point is that you can't convince folks in rich countries to be truly sustainable and you can't convince the rest to not aim for a higher standard of living. Putin said something like that and he was right.

And we keep coming up with ideas to make it worse: blockchain and now AI.

Bingo. A lot of what passes for solutions are fairly anemic. We will swap out any technology for a similar less intensive alternative but the instant we have to actively change our lifestyle it is largely ignored.

It isn't because people are malicious, it is that people tend to normalize the conditions they are raised in even if they are wildly exceptional.

All individual solutions (“lifestyle”) are inherently anemic and impotent. You don’t avert an extinction event with public service announcements and solar panel rebates.

The only thing it is useful for is scapegoating (cf. this thread).

I think if you should be able to at least have the peace of mind that you did all you could (within reason, short of pulling a Ted Kaczynski or his modern equivalent Luigi Mangione). Maybe it’s inevitable - history shows tons of species go extinct and maybe unbridled capitalism is how we go, maybe seven million years give or take is all humans will have. Maybe I absorbed too much of Meditations by Aurelius.

What about food and overall consumption?

Eating meet, beef especially, with fish a close second, is insanely impactful on the planet. Cows use tons of food, fresh water and release tons of methane, a gas 200 times worse than CO2.

Do you use AI?

Just saying, we could care but being light on the planet is very difficult without dramatically changing our life styles.

I know I do so much, but honestly an emission tax is the very first thing we need out there.

Because we can't be blamed into being eco-friendly as individuals, it's up to taxes to regulate consumption.

You don’t use a tax on consumption for things that are destroying the planet. You ban it or ration it. How can “lifestyle” even factor into this? It doesn’t because it’s not about lifestyle at all.[1] We will keep criss-crossing container ships across the world and maybe pass on the extinction event tax to discipline the lower classes. Then we can use that money to transfer the wealth to the single home owning class in the form of solar panel rebates and EV discounts.

[1] That people drive to work is the tip of the iceberg. Just when it comes to cars alone, you also have all the transportation of goods that need to be dumped off more locally than the closest harbor or train freight station. But only the tip of the iceberg is discussed as far as “blame” is concerned. (How curious.) The “ban” here is quite loaded as it would implicate the whole supply chain.

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