Comment by drnick1
7 hours ago
> I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.
What a pointless comment.
"Climate Change" isn't caused by flying a plane, it's caused by flying thousands of planes every day. This is a real distinction because the individuals you are talking to do not have any meaningful way to affect the 40,000+ flights per day. Just as a random example.
If your next response is going to be "well if everyone stops taking flights that would affect them all", then yes, congratulations, you've discovered what laws are and how democracies work.
Username checks out. I do live that sort of lifestyle and I think your agument is bogus. Different people engage in different amounts of carbon-producing consumerism, but it's notable that different developed countries have quite different carbon outputs, indicating that it's possible to achieve the goal of lowering the collective carbon footprint without immiserating the population.
That's a ludicrous proposal.
A whole planets' society's structural problems cannot be solved by an individuals action. Your own attitude explains the 'why'.
This is a systemic issue that needs systemic fixing.
Indeed. File under "bitter pills to swallow."
It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc.
Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly hard it is to live where they are.
I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.
They do not ask themselves where the factories are built that make the wind turbines or solar panels, what powers their buses and trains and makes the cement that the streets are paved with. What powers the diesel trucks that bring their organic produce and manufactured soy products to Whole Foods for them.
All this isn't to even comment on where climate change actually is on the 2 axes of "Non-issue ----> existential threat" and "Completely avoidable if we start now ----> Entirely outside human control." I'm just saying that I suspect nearly every Western climate change activist would be filled with regret if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
> if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
Effectively no one is arguing for this. You're ranting about a ghost.
That's a straw man argument.
Voluntarily opting out of a high-CO2 lifestyle will do exactly nothing. Demanding that anyone recognizing the threat of climate change and demanding a different approach "first change their lifestyles" or using their lifestyles as an indicator of commitment is ludicrous. This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Besides that; all the nice and shiny things you mention - the busses and trains and the cement - can be produced and operated at fraction of their current CO2 cost. Wind mills and PV panels offset their CO2 cost by magnitudes if they are replacing fossil fuel industries.
There's a middle ground between "lets burn it all to the ground" and "let's go back to the savanna".
> This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Nothing will change (and nothing has fundamentally changed since the climate scaremongering started), because people in the West do not want to change their lifestyles, and people elsewhere aspire to a Western lifestyle. There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
1 reply →
> I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.
You did it, you torched the strawman.
This is just a poor strawman/false dilemma: you don't have to be 100% or 0% for something to be effective or true. You're not addressing the actual claim (_why_ climate change is controversial, and particularly why the current structure makes it particularly controversial to corporations, etc.), you're just making a non-sequitur that everyone is affected by it.
It's like someone saying "tax fraud by billionaires is a massive issue" and responding "well, did you declare every single dollar on your tax forms hmm?": they're both issues, but the former is obviously a much more impactful, structural and relevant one. You're trying to nullify their argument by attacking the "purity" of the person, but that doesn't negate the truth of their point. This is like a greatest-hits of common logical/debate fallacies (strawman, false dilemma, non-sequitur).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
There's a reason it's called a "problem." Doing the thing on your own is not a solution to it.
Sure we can all do our part as best possible, but this requires systemic change.
Required reading: https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/