The juicy question is how much damage is one entitled to?
Just buy as many carbon offsets or similar as necessary for your existence to come out net positive.
I don't think it's possible for anyone, even a well off individual, to offset what living in 1/4 acre or more lots does to society as a whole, since mass transit is no longer feasible, which means density is less feasible, and it causes a whole chain reaction of extra fuel use.
You can use approximations.
> I don't think it's possible [...] to offset what living in 1/4 acre or more lots does [...]
Sure, dense living has a smaller footprint.
But individuals can still buy enough offsets. It's just going to be more expensive.
You can also get more creative with your offsets. For example, I could try to find two people who are currently living sparsely and convince them with a bit of money to move to a dense neighbourhood. That would more than offset any personal decision to live in a sparse neighbourhood.
(Slatestarcodex had a similar idea about eating meat: just bribe other people to become vegetarian, if you are worried about your net impact but still want to eat tasty, tasty meat.
Obviously, normal well-adjusted humans don't take kindly to trading in such indulgences.)
This is one example of something you can’t offset.
Germany also has both reasonable public transport and good accommodation for private vehicles. You can totally find some people who are on the margin between the two and could be persuaded either way relatively easily.
But even granting that part of your argument, I don't see how you can't offset it? You could either be non-specific and just buy enough carbon offsets. Or if you want to specifically offset public transport use, just bribe some people to move to place with better public transport.
Even the mention of more density or less road for people’s private cars will cause a public outcry that will shut the project down. And it takes years if not decades to construct public transport, so that political will has to run through multiple elections.
My proposal was about changing what people do on the margin. And assuming that we can offset behaviour anywhere on the globe. Ie that you can get more people in Germany on public transport to make up for your sins in America.
(Btw, buses don't need much of a change to the road layout.)
You can do some finance to calculate the present value of the income stream needed to offset the expected impact of all your progeny forever.
We act like eating a little less meat or buying a Tesla is the equivalent of a the Nobel Peace Prize but it’s just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Let’s get real and enjoy this ride while it lasts.
Which to me clearly show the truth of your comment. You can swap out all the plastic bags for cloth bags and buy a Tesla and spend an hour sorting your trash every week, but taking that flight for a honeymoon to Tahiti or living in a suburb and driving everywhere negates all of it and more.
I’ve never lived in an apartment bigger than 600 square feet, have never driven a car, don’t fly, eat a plant based diet, and will never have kids. We’re about a generation or two from a total disaster and everybody wants to think tiny insignificant changes are enough. Glad I’ll be be long dead by then.
I fly maybe once a year, avoid red meat, and live in a dense neighborhood. I'm doing more environmental damage than most people and I've made my peace with it.
The only realistic and honest way to assess overall impact is put a number on your total consumption. There are a million ways that can be skewed, but averages don't vary as much as you think - as an overall reality check, if you make and spend your $50K salary every year, that is going to be the order of magnitude of your environmental impact. Mostly, someone who consumes $500K worth of stuff is going to have 10x the impact, and someone who consumes $5K will have 1/10th the impact. How you spend it is second order.
This attitude will never catch on, because people feel, innately and through socialization, that misers are bad, "bean counters" are bad, simple but difficult solutions are bad, and focusing on specific actions, symbols, in-groups and out-groups, is what drives normal social activity and fulfillment.
The psychology of "saving the environment" reminds me a lot of dieting for people who struggle with their weight, or budgeting for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It's the total that matters, not the parts, and yet it's very difficult to approach it any way other than piece by piece.
I’d like to think it was this easy, but I don’t believe it is. A Manhattan apartment costs a million dollars or more, but that person can use public transport to get around. Someone in Arkansas lives in a suburb of Little Rock and drives 30 miles to work one way every day in a pickup truck they don’t need and uses fuel costing $1 per gallon or less. And their house cost $200k.
I wouldn’t be able to say the person in Manhattan is causing an order more environmental impact, especially when our world doesn’t price in externalities of fuel use at all for most of the population.
Externalities are a cop-out. There are always externalities, but they're just used as an excuse for special pleading. If you average a large amount of consumption, the amount of oil per dollar, and the externalities of burning it, are going to be fairly consistent. The type of consumption is dwarfed by the amount of consumption; that's the claim I'm making. It's not that the "environmental choice" isn't better all else being equal, but it doesn't make up for hardly any consumption as a percentage. If you're not saving significant money as a percentage with your choices, you're not improving your lifestyle significantly.