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Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

I agree with what you're saying, I think people do have a moral obligation to try to be consistent in their beliefs and actions.

But there's also a different way to view this: This is a textbook tragedy of the commons situation. Basically we're stuck in regime where at the individual level, you're hurting yourself if you're doing the right thing, for almost zero gain to the environment. Getting out of that regime takes concerted action, which most likely will not happen without regulation. The most effective way to help solve the problem is therefore to push for that regulation. That's probably unless you're a celebrity or something.

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And one way to "push for that regulation" is giving an example that you are not hurting yourself too much if your choices reflect the legislation you demand.

If you ARE in fact hurting yourself too much, then you prove that people can chose one from the following:

A) keep the status quo, but the planet will most probably heat up and very bad things happen.

B) change the status quo to something that really, really hurts. But the reward for your surrender is that there is a chance that the planet does not heat up so much and less bad things happen a few decades from now.

That is what most people perceive in climate activists.

Yes, it makes sense that it could be perceived that way. But that would not be entirely accurate, since it will get much cheaper to emit less CO2 once there is effective regulation in place.

For example: If a really painful Carbon tax was introduced over night, the next day people's lives would look a lot different. Activities that used to be mundane would suddenly be expensive luxuries.

However, that's ignoring the fact that the economy would start to route around this tax. What are currently still niche low-carbon technologies will get a lot cheaper due to economies of scale. Photovoltaics are already a super cheap way of making electricity while the sun shines - suddenly there's going to be a huge incentive to building out storage.

(Of course, you wouldn't actually do that over night.)

Sure thing, that mitigations would apply.

But again, the OP is about credibility. So, for the advocates of legislation changes (e.g. climate activists) it would give their credibility a huge boost if they started to surrender symbolically from things like traveling abroad (and also, would remove a rhetorically very easy target from their critics).

The proposed legislation itself should of course refrain from being "just" symbolic.

Where does the moral obligation to be morally consistent come from? I think few people question that, and we end up with apologist articles like OP’s link. The “moral consistency” of an individual has no influence on the veracity of a statement or moral truth.

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