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Comment by slothtrop | Hacker News Reader

So, oil and coal then. Unless you had a different point.

Pretty sure the point was that we should take personal responsibility for our actions.

The obvious contrapositive to this is what happened during the pandemic: everyone stopped driving for a couple months and it had... Almost no impact. The curtain is pulled back now: the call for "individual responsibility" is exposed as cynical the PR tactic it is... Much like "plastic recycling". The fact is 1) Big corporations 2) Big corporations and 3) Big corporations in concert with the legislators they've captured are responsible for climate change. As an individual the most effective behavior you can exhibit to limit climate change is to vote with 1) Your Democracy while you still have it and more importantly 2) Your wallet.

Responsibility should be placed where it can actually change something.

Yes, when dealing with things in our own lives it's usually best to go with "at your own feet", not mater who the actors are, since the only person whose actions you can change are your own.

But as far as climate goes, we, the individuals (who happen to not be rich at the moment) have no power to change anything. So taking personal responsibility will change nothing.

Well, actually, people taking personal responsibility for the climate have possibly made it worse by redirecting the attention to themselves.

I'm down. Let's start by making the oil companies take "personal" responsibility for the externalities they create, including the amount of warming they have caused (and that they know they have caused). Perhaps with a carbon tax.

Whether it's fair or not, personal responsibility has been very clearly pointed out and it's not changed anything. People are shitty and selfish, or sometimes just naive, and at their best, when they do everything they should, they are impotent.

Consumers are not just going to pull on their big boy pants and stop consuming, and we'll all live happily in a recovered ecosystem eating organic corn by candlelight. It has to be regulation on industry, and improvements to production (eg ditch coal power generation). Stop it where it matters, where impacts have the scale to actually matter.

I've been riding my bike to work this whole damn time! I think we're going to have to be a bit more ambitious.

Governments in the West make it a matter of explicit policy to increase consumption. That is what immigration rates are for, to prop up GDP, then every newcomer from the 3rd-world gets a larger carbon footprint overnight. It makes no sense to blame consumers for that.

If the serious consideration for those posturing starts and ends with consumption, then the consistent approach would be to oppose immigration. They do not, because it was never the point. Self-righteously indignation and signaling is.

Saying this with the awareness that both right-wing detractors and far-leftists like to target consumers/consumption, as for the latter it dovetails with their anti-Capitalism. Just look at the fusion energy thread from the other day, people are voicing concern that carbon-neutral and cheaper energy would lead to people buying more things. Westerners are struggling to get by, with purchasing power stagnating for years, and yet it's being projected they're practically drowning in useless stuff compared to their grandparents.

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