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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

> If people don't consider their personal footprint before taking purchase decisions, maybe they will take into consideration that they are being targeted by a growing group of people.

They will never do that. NEVER. It has become a perennial joke at this point in Germany with climate activists who block streets only to afterwards rack up 20k miles of air travel in half a year. The explanation? "The problem is systemic, individual actions don't matter".

Nobody considers their contribution relevant, because in total theirs will be dwarfed by everyone else's. That's just human nature. If the most-involved activists don't, how can you expect random people to?

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Your negation is way too strong, an ever-growing number of people do, in fact, take their personal footprint into account for every decision, my family and myself included.

I don't know about your anecdotal joke about some German activists flying 20k miles in half a year, but it's also a fact that flygskam is growing, that people who can afford it reportedly take a train even when it's slower, and that airlines are looking into carbon offsets. Another anecdote, my local XR group has a car pooling mailing list to make sure they attend all demonstrations in a convenient, low-carbon manner.

The math is simple, every liter of fuel kept in the ground will slow down global warming. There is no "threshold" that we will reach at which point all humanity is doomed.

His "anecdotal joke" is fact and was in the German speaking news, just like the "anecdote" about the activists who blocked the street to protest cars after arriving in, you guessed it, a car of their own!

They are hypocrites who make life hard for others by preaching water and drinking heavily wine, as it were.

I am not contradicting him. I am sure you understand that these cases make headlines more easily because of the shock-value, and that all other activists who are not doing that are not making it into the news.

I am also sure you understand that seeing some hypocrites preaching water while drinking wine should not stop you from reducing your alcohol intake, as you know it's unhealthy regardless.

It's not about uncovering hypocrites (though I do believe it's important to do so, lies are destroying society), it's about managing expectations.

There are giant gaps between what humans a) believe to be true, b) do individually and c) say they believe and do. You can get people to say that they believe some action is necessary, but it's rare to see actual meaningful action that actually impacts them (it's easy to say "I'm fine with outlawing meat" if you don't like meat for example, it's very different if you happen to enjoy meat).

My point is that it's unreasonable to expect average people to take "the big picture" into account for individual decisions (e.g. buying car, or taking a vacation away from home, or having children, or changing their diet), and all you can expect from doing so is disappointment over how uncommitted people are.

The best were the two German "climate activists" who flew to Thailand and Bali - their explanation was that they flew there as private persons and not as "activists" :D

Well then it's ok if I pollute as well, since I'm doing it only as a private person and not in my quality as an activist!

What I find most annoying about it is that they're perfectly aware that what they're doing is wrong in their moral codex, but they still do it because "it's a once in a lifetime opportunity", "I really, really wanted to" etc etc, yet they're somehow unable to assume that others might feel the same way about their own life and their opportunities.

It looks like the classic NPC-illusion where people think that yes, everybody should totally do whatever is right, but it shouldn't apply to themselves, because they are the player, not just another NPC. They tend to forget that they're NPCs to everyone else.

But I ascribe most of it to them being young. I'm sure if I had been more politically aligned with the mainstream when I was 20, I would've been insufferable as well.

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