Comment by openasocket
5 hours ago
I think that's a bad frame of mind in general. One of the primary ways industry tries to prevent regulation is by putting the burden on the individual. People think the only way we can have a healthy environment is by sacrificing things for the average person. And one of the worst things environmentalists can do is play along with that. In the US there's a push to ban plastic straws, which is annoying to the average consumer, while basically every item you can purchase comes wrapped in tons of plastic packaging. Industry LOVES things like this because it does little to actually reduce plastic consumption, and pits the average person against the environmental movement.
As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?
Oh we can and should absolutely do both. Travel and tourism has other downsides which make it worth reducing it, like the fast spread of diseases for example.
The difference between removing plastic straws and reducing air travel is that reducing air travel would have an impact.
Sure, but as I said in my second example, forcing oil and natural gas companies to prevent methane leaks would have much more of an impact than reducing air travel, and requires no sacrifice for the average person. When considering which policies to advance, we should look at both the potential impact AND the democratic support for it.
Climate change deniers and polluters want to paint the environmental movement as a bunch of neo-Puritans that deride anything that isn’t the bare minimum of subsistence as immoral. And I worry they’ve done this for so long that some supporters of the environment are starting to believe the lie.
If people like Steve are advocating for such insanely unpopular policies as ending all travel (or is it just that you need to prove to the government that you have a valid reason for a travel permit?) I don’t think they’re concerned with the ideas’ democratic prospects at all.
Seems like he’s looking forward to a dictatorship that will just tell us all what we’re allowed to do, without the burdensome need for our dumb pleb voices to be heard. Maybe they could call the folks who enforce the policy the “Klimate Governing Board.”
The neo Calvinism runs deep. People think fixing problems involves austerity and take aways for the unelect.
It's a real problem because it has really bad political optics. And results in obsessing about 'fixing' inconsequential things or solutions that make things worse.