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Comment by danhor | Hacker News Reader

"Big Industry" matters a lot, but personal transportation is also a large part of emissions. Especially for people that fly intercontinental more than once a decade.

It's wrong to assume that you can just convince people to give up their fossil fuel SUVs, but that means another mechanism has to be used to make them, not that aggregated personal choice doesn't have a huge impact.

This campaign promoted an inefficient mechanism, fully knowing it wouldn't work, but that doesn't mean that peoples lifestyles don't matter.

Arguing that only industry needs to change is also a cheap cop-out, belying the scale of the problem.

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The point is simple. CO2 emissions suffer from tragedy of the commons. The person taking individual positive action can only suffer from it. Tragedy of the commons requires government action like carbon taxes and subsidies. This is easy to implement. Making snide comments on online forums does nothing, nor does making individual personal sacrifices that obviously don't scale.

I bought an EV not because I have any delusions that my purchase of an EV would save the planet. I bought it because California offered me free car pool lane access that would get me back 20 minutes every day on the commute. With the subsidies etc, TCO worked out to be the same as a Camry.

When 100 million EVs are sold we will see some meaningful impact.

Individual sacrifices (I would rather say individual lifestyle changes) do scale somwhat (for example meat consumption has gone down in germany by almost 10% over the last 10 years and it's not because meat is expensive or had disincentives attached to it), but not to the degree needed.

Saying we only need nuclear power is obviously not true and in this case the snide comment points to the fact that the lifes of individuals will also need to change and pushing all needed change away to the industry is wrong. Peoples lifes will need to change, encouraged and enforced by legislation.

And I do think people also hava a individual responsibility (especially for stuff that can't be decarbonised in the near future with good alternatives like meat consumption or flying, but also for buying unneeded large cars or wasting energy), even though it doesn't work for change on a larger scale.

> for example meat consumption has gone down in germany by almost 10% over the last 10 years and it's not because meat is expensive or had disincentives attached to it),

Any citations to show that this reduction was through altruistic individual action for climate change?

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