The whole carbon footprint thing was created to shift blame from the dirty industry to inviduals - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
Consumer do emit significant amounts of carbon, and whatever someone else does, we need to reduce it. Pointing the finger at someone else and saying, 'well they do it', doesn't help climate change; it just throws around blame - generally a useless distraction in life - and adjusts our standards to the lowest denominator.
Is that true? Or is it true that no factor is more than 10%, so everyone can use this rhetoric and say '90% isn't me!'
Also, if you think about it, though it's a very trendy take (which you can see repeated many times on this page) - think past the trend: it's a transparent, embarrassing abdication of responsibility. As just one person, only a tiny amount of the world is impacted by me, but I still have full responsibility for it. I don't sh-t in the street and say, '99.99% isn't me'. A soldier doesn't go AWOL and say, 'only 0.0001% of the battle is me'.
> 99% of the media coverage and legislation on me
Is that true? And if so, is it only the things you read about, the media coverage covering things that interest their readers and not generally addressing technical regulations of power plants?
There's such an attempt at a victim position - a common rhetorical tactic to disrupt progress and serious consideration of issues. Instead of pointing the finger and using rhetoric, which accomplishes nothing, what are you doing about climate change?
> Transportation (27% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation primarily come from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes. Over 90% of the fuel used for transportation is petroleum based, which includes primarily gasoline and diesel.2
> Electricity production (25% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Electricity production generates the second largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Approximately 60% of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas.3
> Industry (24% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Greenhouse gas emissions from industry primarily come from burning fossil fuels for energy, as well as greenhouse gas emissions from certain chemical reactions necessary to produce goods from raw materials.
> Commercial and Residential (13% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Greenhouse gas emissions from businesses and homes arise primarily from fossil fuels burned for heat, the use of certain products that contain greenhouse gases, and the handling of waste.
> Agriculture (11% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture come from livestock such as cows, agricultural soils, and rice production.
> Land Use and Forestry (13% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Land areas can act as a sink (absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere) or a source of greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, since 1990, managed forests and other lands are a net sink, i.e., they have absorbed more CO2 from the atmosphere than they emit.
> the media coverage covering things that interest their readers and not generally addressing technical regulations of power plants?
This is insanely naive. The media is propaganda which benefits their owners, the same ones that own the polluting corporations.
3/4 of Transportation comes from road travel, only 45% of which is consumers, so... 9% of emissions due to road travel by consumers. The EPA doesn't distinguish between "Commercial and Residential" but we can be extremely generous and say 50% of that residential (we're ignoring that commercial is actually using the vast majority due to refrigeration, lighting and air conditioning)... then around 15% is due to things consumers have direct power over. Obviously I mixed numbers (greenhouse gasses vs. just CO2) but as you can see by rough estimate, the rhetorical exaggeration is not far off at all. Newspapers just blame individuals so that those who actually have control of these things and profit from it can keep profiting.
> Instead of pointing the finger and using rhetoric, which accomplishes nothing, what are you doing about climate change?
Nice ad hominem but it would fail even if it weren't a logical fallacy, because the answer is far more than almost everyone, which is pretty easy in Sweden using public transportation, buying only green electricity, living next door to two second hand stores and buying virtually nothing ever anyway (being a minimalist) and running everything into the ground before I replace it.
> Instead of pointing the finger and using rhetoric
Correctly identifying the source of the problem is exactly what everyone should do in every situation, otherwise you end up with the wrong solutions.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
The consumer is obviously accountable too.
You can't sit and eat a mail order stake from japan and say you have no carbon footprint, but the airline and ag industries do.
The obvious answer has always been cap and trade, but it is dead on arrival because consumers don't want to pay more for their CO2 intensive goods.
They have no power over how such things are produced. Markets are not democracies. Everything those corporations are doing can be done in a sustainable way, but they choose not to for the sake of growth.
You're also forgetting all the manipulative advertising and propaganda driving people to consume more for the sake of growth.
Anyway, even if every single consumer made the absolute best choice (which is impossible given information asymmetry and finite wealth), then corporations would still be responsible for 90% and the news would still be talking about individuals 99% of the time.
I would argue that corporations have zero carbon footprint and consumers have 100% of the carbon footprint.
>[consumers] have no power over how such things are produced.
Consumers have 100% of the power. If they dont purchase a good, it wont be produced. The whole reason Industries dont move away from carbon is because consumers refuse to pay more for it.
For example, carbon free airlines are technically feasible today but Dead on Arrival because no one will pay for the ticket.
Regulations can have an impact, but the only reason they work is because they take the option to buy cheap and dirty products away from Consumers.
Like I said above, cap-and-trade is a simple solution but consumers don't want it because they know prices will get past along. 1 million little Industrial regulations will also pass the costs along, but consumers are more okay with them because they erroneously think the cost won't be passed to them. They have a downside that bad are rarely logical and have unintended and sometimes counterproductive consequences.
Nope, because they have no control over the products that are available, how they are produced and most likely cannot afford to pay more.
> Consumers have 100% of the power.
No, 0%. They have _NO_ vote on how industry does what it does. Industry is not a democracy. They cannot just not buy food and electricity. That's stupid. They have to buy the things they can afford. The working class doesn't just have extra cash laying around, they buy what they can afford, unlike infinite growth corporations who are trying to avoid profit loss.
Alas, I can see you've already made up your mind about this.
There are options to buy low carbon, and nobody does. People can vote with their wallets or they can vote at the ballot box. They will pay the increased cost either way.
I think you are in error if you think that somehow making the change with regulations means the cost wont be passed to consumers.
I already addressed this twice, but let's do it a third time. People don't "vote" with their wallets. That's nonsense and not democracy because the "votes" aren't distributed remotely equally. Most people don't have margins to make these choices easily, as I already said... and are also being fed manipulative advertisements and propaganda, as I already said.
> I think you are in error if you think that somehow making the change with regulations means the cost wont be passed to consumers.
Nope.
That's a misconception spread by the anti-tax crowd. The seller can take the increased cost out of their own profits or they can try to pass it along as an increased the price, but they can't just demand that people buy their product at the higher price.
First, in this respect, there is no difference between regulatory costs and other costs (e.g., raw materials); it's just costs. Second, goods are generally already priced to maximize profit (profit each x items sold), and not based on cost (e.g., not 'cost + 50%'); increasing prices (the first factor) causes the quantity of sales (the second factor) to drop. The ability to increase prices without sacrificing profits depends on the price elasticity of the item: if you have the only well in a desert, you can charge what you want for water; if it is 100 yards from a clear, running river, your ability to increase prices is limited.
For example, it might cost Coca-Cola to 2 cents to make a liter of Coke and they might charge $2. If regulations increase the cost to 10 cents, will they now charge $2.10? No, they chose $2 as the price that generates maximum revenue; that doesn't change with the increased cost. They likely eat the cost themselves.
Blaming average joe is turning large part of population into fed-up-by-all-this-shit group, I can see it around me quite a bit.
Me personally I am still all in, but at this point I am completely fed up with radical and utterly naive folks who blame all general population and push for more restrictions, celebrating straws and ignoring lobbying elephants. Thats not where real solution is.
Going your way is a very ineffective solution that will take too long to get into effect (convince population that will make politicians realize this is what gets them elected, and over time regulations come), and the damage needs to be addressed now
It's the same old tactic used by reactionaries to polarize and disrupt every other discussion - somehow twist the reactionaries into victims, demonize whoever by just lobbing tons of BS at the wall, and turn it into an impossible emotional discussion. End of discussion!
I don't care what you think about activists; I think that's an intentional distraction - just like the others that have been used for decades to prevent action on climate change. You are doing a great job of it.
You are missing the point, purposely, because now we are talking about your BS (and there is more BS in the comment, but I have better things to do).
https://old.reddit.com/r/environment/comments/dbabxu/til_tha...
combine this ^ with:
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/12/05/tale-fish-two-cou...
> An example of this would be when a wild cod is caught off the coast of Alaska and, due to economic factors, is shipped to another country to be fabricated into fillets and packaged. If this process of turning a whole fish into packaged fillets occurs in China, the cod fillets are declared “Wild Caught Product of China” upon import into the United States.
So, I cannot buy straws because of pollution, but large industry, can catch fish in alaska, transport it to china, process it there, transport it back to US and sell it?
you think that "the dirty industry" are just emitting carbon for the fun of it?
On top of that, our governments are full of cowards who won't create policies that make it more expensive to destroy the planet than to save it.
Yes, for fun and profit.
This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd.
No it's not. The cost of pumping CO2 into the air should be factored into the cost of running a polluting factory. If it's not factored in, there's basically zero chance that a "clean" alternative factory will be economically competitive today. Asking everyone in the world to voluntarily spend more on goods that they're not even sure are manufactured in a cleaner way (see "greenwashing") seems like a dead end to me.
I also agree with you we should factor in CO2 production as a cost, to take advantage of the economic system (which actually works pretty well within it's domain after all, eh?)
For some reason lots of people have this idea that the path to solving climate change is for consumers to make no changes to their wasteful consumption, but somehow fix it on the backend so everything is net-zero. In reality, the only workable path must include systematic changes that result in people consuming less (along with lowering industrial emissions for the consumption that remains)
combine this ^ with:
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/12/05/tale-fish-two-cou...
> An example of this would be when a wild cod is caught off the coast of Alaska and, due to economic factors, is shipped to another country to be fabricated into fillets and packaged. If this process of turning a whole fish into packaged fillets occurs in China, the cod fillets are declared “Wild Caught Product of China” upon import into the United States.
Yes, the fishing industry is to blame for shipping caught fish from USA to china and back, and the whole thing is very absurd.
When it comes to CO2, personal vehicles emit several times more carbon than the entire global shipping fleet.
I don't see how it's any more absurd than manufacturing iPhones in China only to have it shipped half way across the world to the American consumer.
Emitting carbon has negative externalities (climate change) that are not priced into the emissions, rather they are passed onto the future you and future generations. We can change this by putting a price on carbon. This will incentivize the growth of cleaner alternatives, give Joe an opportunity to not contribute to emissions, and this will affect the profits of the “dirty industry”.
The “dirty industry” wants to keep profits as high as possible for as long as possible, it’s just business. Blaming average Joe on the problem is a distraction. Blaming individuals for systemic issues is fruitless. Industry knows this. The longer policy can be delayed, the longer profits can be made.
The systematic issues that folk talk about abstractly are things like “too many people pick SUVs rather than commuting by subway” or “society needs to switch away from eating so much beef”. It isn’t just a matter of waltzing into a factory and turning some dials that the greedy factory owner doesn’t want to change
When I talk about systemic issues, I talk specifically about the distribution of personal choices people can make that lead to outcomes. Taken into context, this means that if I only have one choice for electricity provider, and my investor owned utility makes a decision to burn coal to generate electricity, there’s very little I can do to change that. If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries. In my city electricity and transportation represents 80% of emissions. These systems have big impacts. You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes.
We don’t have to have these systems, you could empower the community to make power purchasing agreements to buy electricity on the wholesale market that would be cleaner than what the utility provides. You could pass mixed use zoning to allow developers the autonomy to build commercial/residential mid rise buildings. People could walk to a lot more stuff. We just choose not to do that.
This is a matter of waltzing into your town hall, state legislature, and congress and demanding that we allow people the ability to make better choices. If people had real choices, we’d have better outcomes.
Many jurisdictions in the US allow people to sign up for alternative energy providers. Electricity is fungible, so technically you might be using electrons from a coal power plant, but on a kWh basis you are supposed to be getting all your electricity from renewable sources. That's basically how so many companies can say they're running on "100% renewable power", without having to build wind turbines/solar panels around their facilities.
>If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries.
1. You can vote with your feet.
2. of all the issues to bring up, this seems like the weakest one. NIMBY zoning laws are probably the most grass-roots type of lobbying there is. It's hard to blame corporations for that.
>You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes.
The comment you replied to doesn't mention "personal responsibility" at all. It only mentions "people" and "customers", ie. groups of people. If 80% of consumers don't want their electricity bills to rise and like white picket suburban houses, that's ultimately a problem with "people" and "customers", even if the remaining 20% are trying to be green but can't be.
They do it because it's what consumers want. It's not industries job to kneecap themselves so that less scrupulous companies can gain market share.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/8bceef94-86cd-11e9-a028-86cea8523...
1. I get the joke you're trying to make, but realistically speaking the fact that the company is in the "fun" industry, doesn't mean the company itself is being run "for fun".
2. that's at least somewhat misleading because the pollutants mentioned are pollutants that tend to be aggressively curtailed for land vehicles (because of their negative effects on local air quality), but are far less of an issue on the open sea
3. I get excusing the consumer if the good/service in question is essential and there's no pollution free alternative, but it seems weird to pin the blame on Carnival when consumers are making entirely discretionary purchases that are known to have negative environmental impacts.
Look at the classic beer industry... you have/had a crate full of standardized glass bottles, with metal caps and paper labels, you pay some deposit to take the crate and the bottles, you drink the beer, return the crate and the empty bottles to be washed and refilled, get back your deposit (or take a new full crate), and that's it. Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles.
Now look at soda industry.... you have 6 plastic bottles full of soda, capped with plastic, with plastic labels, wrapped in plastic (a "six pack"), set on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic, that you throw away after you drink them (or return them for recycling, and then china burns them).
And in the meantime, we're discussing and banning plastic straws.
And this is just a tiny thing, compared to all the poisons that are emited by large industries, especially in 3rd world countries using unregulated, dangerous chemicals (pesticides, herbicides,...) that are killing the local ecosystems, so nestle can earn 2cents extra on a box of cocoa powder.
I'm not sure what time period "classic" implies, but what you described hasn't been the case for years.
About 12 percent of all U.S. beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981. Since 2007, the percentage has been negligible, according to statistics kept by the Washington, D.C.-based Beer Institute.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reusable-beer-bottles-facing-ex...
>Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles.
I find it strange that you admit this is a thing, but ultimately gloss over it. What really is the TCO of plastic bottles vs glass bottles? It's tempting to conclude that reusing must be better than throwing stuff out, but given the costs associated with transporting heavy glass bottles and/or sanitizing them, it's not exactly obvious which one has overall higher costs.
>(or return them for recycling, and then china burns them).
There's a lot wrong with recycling today (eg. ending up in landfills because recycling is too expensive), but what you described isn't one of them. Landfill space in the US is cheap as it is. Nobody is shipping plastic half-way across the world only to incinerate them.
It's still the case in many countries for "normal" (non craft, etc.) beers.
> I find it strange that you admit this is a thing, but ultimately gloss over it. What really is the TCO of plastic bottles vs glass bottles? It's tempting to conclude that reusing must be better than throwing stuff out, but given the costs associated with transporting heavy glass bottles and/or sanitizing them, it's not exactly obvious which one has overall higher costs.
Considering that CO2 is not the only thing, and we have problems with microplastics, we should consider that impact too.
> There's a lot wrong with recycling today (eg. ending up in landfills because recycling is too expensive), but what you described isn't one of them. Landfill space in the US is cheap as it is. Nobody is shipping plastic half-way across the world only to incinerate them.
But we did just that, before china banned import. We ship that stuff over to china "for recycling" and they burn it. Same with e-waste in africa ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-... )
Realistically speaking the amount of microplastics being generated from drink bottles is negligible in first world countries. Over there, the overwhelming amount of plastic waste is properly managed (recycled or landfilled), which means they're not sitting in rivers degrading and generating microplastic.
> But we did just that, before china banned import. We ship that stuff over to china "for recycling" and they burn it. Same with e-waste in africa ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-... )
Again, it's more complicated than that. The importers are actually trying to recycle the plastic/e-waste. It's just that through a combination of incompetence/malice, that some of the unrecycleable waste gets improperly disposed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/7025017...
>China had plenty of capacity to handle plastics and lots of cheap laborers to sort the recyclable materials from the nonrecyclable. By 2016, the U.S. was exporting almost 700,000 tons a year to China alone. Overall, China imported 7 million tons from around the world.
>About five years ago, the Chinese government started to worry about all this trash coming in. A lot of the plastic was contaminated with stuff that made it difficult and expensive to recycle – paper, food waste, plastic wrap (which is not recyclable). And some of the plastic was hard to recycle and thus not profitable to import.
I suppose your statement is technically true in the sense that yes, we do ship plastic to china, and yes, they burn some of it, but that statement is still misleading. With the same logic you could also say that we send people to hospitals to die.
Also this criticism fails to take into account how people actually live. When I was in Menlo Park, California it was discovered that pool filter pumps draw lots of energy over time because they get left on and old designs are extremely inefficient. This news spread and all over town older boomers who of course lived a lifestyle with pools in their backyard had their pool filter pumps upgraded to modern designs and often changed to have them powered by solar and allowed to stop overnight. The savings from a neighborhood of rich folks converting pool filter pumps all in a short period of time was significant and now a huge constant draw from the local grid has been eliminated. There is no way that is a plot by dirty industry, just a big victory that gets overlooked because of carelessness and political projection.