Comment by jacobolus
8 years ago
There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking personal steps, but by themselves they are largely worthless. It’s like optimizing an I/O bound program by speeding up some of the arithmetic operations not on any critical path.
Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic – not just useless but actively counterproductive because it makes people dismiss you as an arrogant jerk.
What’s needed are large-scale policy changes (international agreements, public investment in research and alternative infrastructure, changes to zoning laws, carbon taxes, regulations of agricultural runoff, crackdown on tax evasion and money laundering and international bribery, ...), which takes significant amounts of political organizing effort, money, and political capital (including flying various leaders around on jets).
Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic
That's a strawman. What the parent comment says is that people's behavior reveals their preferences. A more clear example is this - someone who drives a Suburban for fun and burns their trash isn't in a good position to demand that others go out of their way to treat the earth better.
One of the complications here is that the CO2 costs of manufacturing the car aren't taken into account. When they are, it can actually be preferable to continue to run the gas guzzler. Manufacturing steel and batteries is hugely energy and resource intensive.
> people's behavior reveals their preferences
Only if they are rational economic actors.
If you live in the sticks and want to buy food which is several kilometers away, do you throw up your hands in the air and starve so that you don't use your car?
I don't think we have to address rationality / irrationality in action.
If I'm following your point you're saying that some people make choices against constraints and that we should understand their constraints before we impugn their actions.
And you're absolutely right. I don't begrudge anyone for driving a truck who uses a truck, and much of the debate about 'what you need' seems to follow this thinking - if you're using your truck in such a way that a sedan is a viable alternative, how costly is it really to put that person in a sedan? And that's a very valid point (personally, I think we have to many trucks and SUVs on the road because fuel is unreasonably cheap and trucks / suv owners don't bear the full costs of crashing / insuring them).
But we can ask that people do the things they expect of others - or at least it's defensible to ask someone to be the change they want to see in the world.
The person who lives in the sticks might have an opportunity to grow their own food, and depending on their views about the environment it's an avenue to explore.
And there's also a point about 'harm reduction' - driving a car to get groceries is more defensible than driving an SUV to get a candy bar and leaving it running while you shop to keep the A/C pumping.
If someone has to drive a car, they need to understand that not all cars pollute alike. A 2016 Prius pollutes orders of magnitude less than a 1959 Chevrolet 2 ton truck and the person should consider ways they can reduce their harm to the environment if they want others to do the same.
All the large-scale policies you cite are mostly useful for the medium and long term, but counter-productive in the sort-term, as creating new "clean" infrastructures is done using our current, fossil fueled infrastructures.
Personal steps are our main chance at a short term effect, and we need that short term effect. A huge part of greenhouse gas emissions for instance is due to meat. It amounts for more than half of it if you count cattle respiration ! This is something that can be almost exclusively solved by personal involvement, i.e. eating less meat or no meat at all. Likewise for personal transportation and home heating/insulation. With these three things other which people have a lot of control, we cover a large part of greenhouse gas emissions.
Your basic unquestioned assumptions are that humans have a non-negligible effect on global warming and that global warming exists. Instead of jumping to conclusions, we must also question and analyze the existing evidence for the premise.