Without the defeatists, the optimists, and everybody in between we'd have it licked!
It’s not about inaction being an excuse, it’s about realising that trying to put out a house fire with a water pistol isn’t going to work - particularly if half the neighbourhood is there chucking gasoline on it.
I live responsibly, recycle, grow my own food, built my house out of traditional and local materials, plant trees, pay for other people to plant trees.
None of it is going to make the damnedest bit of difference, other than mildly soothing my conscience. If I really cared about my impact, I would kill myself. I’ve done the next best thing and had myself sterilised - no children, ever.
The world is still going to die. I’ll just be in a happier place when the food riots start.
That was one of the stupidest similes I’ve heard. A more accurate one would be: if everyone just stopped hauling up buckets of water from the sea to pour them into the intact ship, we could avoid the disaster.
And this is illustrates something very important. Climate change isn’t an inevitable catastrophe out of our hands. It is a catastrophe everyone of us us creating with our individual actions every day. If each of us just stoped, there would be no catastrophe.
If everyone just stopped (the probability of industrialised society stopping dead in its tracks overnight is nil, and despite four decades of hand waving nothing has changed, apart from emissions inexorably increasing, and more and more chaotic systems being kicked into action), there would still be a catastrophe of immeasurable proportions.
Our time under the sun is done.
I think hope is insidious - having faith that everything will somehow be ok despite all evidence to the contrary is deeply counterproductive.
The best advice I can give anyone, and the advice I myself have acted upon, is to enjoy what remains of our short lives.
It's nice to feel in control, so I understand why you might want that story to be true -- but I'd suggest a better use of your energy would be political action. The only way this problem can be solved is through significant political action that is proportional to the climate catastrophe we are facing. Anything else is adjusting deckchairs on the Titanic.
Your analogy makes no sense by the way -- nobody was pouring buckets of water into the Titanic. The hull was breached -- there was a fundamental problem with the state of the ship. In fact, everyone getting pails and throwing water off the Titanic wouldn't have saved the ship or the people. Individual philanthropic action can't fix problems that an entire economic system has created.
However, I would also like to put forward the following argument for why your own efforts could make a difference:
Imagine a trolley, speeding toward a junction. On one branch is a child, tied to the rails.
You are in the plant room and can cut power to the trolley, but this will only slow it down - the trolley's momentum alone will kill the child. However, you see across the way a stranger in the signal box, surrounded by levers controlling the points in the station. They are frantically pulling levers, but so far they haven't hit on the one which diverts the trolley.
Should you cut the power to slow the trolley?
We are on the tracks - if we survive, it will be because of a political or technical breakthrough before it's too late. We don't know precisely when too late is - it could be ten years, or twenty, or ten years ago and we're buggered. Each individual's emissions savings make too late a little later, which changes the odds of survival a little bit (or our estimate of the odds - this is probably the philosophical weak spot in the argument).
Maybe the plane trip you don't take or the car you stop driving or the product you choose not to buy is the marginal decision that gives time to avert disaster. If we do avert disaster, one of these decisions must be that marginal decision, somewhere, somewhen.
These choices are tickets in the not-extinction lottery, and it makes sense to play when you can, as much as you can.
My point is that you will get far more bang for your buck if you spend energy on political action. Most ordinary people don't have time to spend on HN arguing about the best way of stopping climate change, they have other things to do in their lives -- and we should be convincing them to take political action (with us) instead of wasting their limited amounts of spare energy on minor personal changes that won't have as much of an impact.
For example for me, the decision never to fly again has not cost me any action points to spend on my involvement in political campaigns, nor has that limited my decision to work in this field for a reduced wage than I could get in adtech, or whatever.
Where efforts are not orthogonal like this I'd say go for politics first though. So we are in agreement!
End consumers are buying and using the products of those emissions. Companies don’t create emissions out of economic isolation and a purely evil desire to ruin the planet. They do it because someone is paying them to do it.
When I buy and burn gas from Shell, I’m the one responsible for those emissions, not Shell, IMO.
Getting those 100 companies to cut their emissions even down by 50% (or spend significant amounts of their massive profits on renewable energy research) would have a larger impact than any individual action you could attempt (and fail) to get the public to do.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10... is an article on the figure if anyone is interested.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
As long as everyone is blaming someone else for the problem political action is worthless. Americans says it doesn’t matter what the US does as long as China is much worse (even though US per capita is 4 times worse than China).
It’s cute how you use demeaning expressions like “it’s nice to feel in control”. If you think anyone with a brain think they are in control of climate change, then you utterly delusional. Everyone with a brain should be on the brink of panic.
And just leave the Titanic. As I said, the simile was stupid from the start.
It wasn't meant to be demeaning. I earnestly believe the reason a lot of people buy into the rhetoric of personal responsibility is because the alternative (they have no control over the situation and need to trust politicians to solve the problem) is more terrifying than blaming themselves for the situation.
The bad-faith argument would've been to say that you they were peddling anti-science climate change propaganda. I didn't say it because (while it does happen to be something pushed by deniers of climate-change, in order to divert attention away from political solutions) most people who say it do honestly believe it.
But yes, the US and other first world countries need to take responsibility for the situation. I don't think getting individuals to blame themselves is helping move towards the goal of stopping this crisis.