Oh, and also: "There's literally nothing we can do / could have done to prevent this awful disaster!" and"Thoughts and prayers" sent by the bucket.
Edit: in total honestly, my wife drew the lines, and I've been happy to live along them. So I claim no great moral superiority here.
Never understood the impetus to restrict yourself when we're beyond negligible.
Carbon footprint propaganda was rhetoric popularized by BP themselves to shift the blame to empathetic people like you and your wife, while they continue to make everything worse.
Vote for and organize for serious progressive candidates who take climate seriously in your local elections. That will do a million $ more than you not taking a vacation because of plane emissions while the rich take private flights down to the grocery store.
I think we should work both ways: be conscious about what we can do as individuals and at the same time, organize society.
Useless? Of course not. Completely negligible? Absolutely, 100%. I'm no climate scientist but voting literally once for the party that believes in climate science probably has about a million x the effect of you not going on vacation.
>Be conscious about what we can do as individuals
All I'm contesting is that the most effective thing we can do is participate and organize in politics.
Not going on vacation and markedly decreasing your quality of life to reduce climate emissions by 1x10^-9999999 percent is naively negligible at best, a propagandized (by an oil company nonetheless) abdication of their larger responsibility to participate in politics causing the actual damage as science denying lunatics fill offices around the nation at worst.
Exactly. I completely agree with the both sides bit, I just think we've got the direction of priority wrong.
Reduction in consumerism comes downstream from that type of education and outreach. Going at consumerism first just makes you seem like a reactionary who wants to "steal our gas stoves" to the ignorant propagandized, and unfortunately needed, masses
The sad thing is that, with all the COVID lock downs and travel restrictions, carbon emissions only slightly went down a couple percent in 2020, and promptly went back up to "normal" levels in 2021.
Given all those rhetorical shaming of individuals to consume less, it's illuminating to actually look at the data and see what's the actual the effect even if you could literally force (instead of shaming) everyone to live that lifestyle.
Reckless misrepresentation of my comment. I suggested that political action is what you should do, not spend your days worrying about how many plastic straws you used.
I'm suggesting all empirics point to the notion that tackling regulation of corporations would have a trillion x the effects of you not allowing yourself to go on vacation because planes = bad.
I am not suggesting any absolution of responsibility. I'm suggesting we look at the basic math behind carbon consumption and note the pretty clear picture painted by 100 companies producing 71% of emissions.
Voting/organizing for politicians that actually change the subsidies given to fossil fuel companies among a litany of other reductions is and always will be a billion x more productive than needlessly preventing yourself from having a nice vacation.
You can’t have a nice vacation in which you hop on an airliner and then rent an SUV to drive around Banff or whatever without these emissions. It’s contradictory. Consumption reduction has to happen while you also stop subsidies and create emission regulations that can reduce the ongoing damage.
If you aren’t willing to make personal changes then nothing will get done because you’ll complain about gas being $19/gallon and a new iPhone costing $4,000 and demand the same economic incentives (emissions) that make our lifestyle artificially cheap.
It’s a fair amount of cognitive dissonance that is required to not put 2 and 2 together here.
To your point, we can do many things at once. But personal consumption reduction everyone likes to hand wave away because it’s easy to just keep doing what you’re doing today and say well if only the corporations maaan.
And they could in most cases produce those goods with a more ecological process, but since that requires reducing profit at least in the short term, it won't ever get done without regulation. Which requires political action.
I agree in general with "consumerism needs to also be reduced" but that's just way down stream from the most impactful things conscientious actors can do. Like those prices would reduce consumerism, and I'd rather have complaints about not being able to afford the new iphone than boiling oceans. I still think there's plenty of space to trim in the profit section of the pie before we increase cost.
I never didn't agree with personal action is important, paper straws good technically, all that good stuff, sure. Just mostly negligible vs political action in a perfectly democratic world.
All I meant to get at is that like per "dollar" of effort spent, you get by far the best return on political action. Personal changes are just nowhere near as efficient. Not taking airplanes vs getting a climate conscious politician elected locally quantified would surely demonstrate that? Again though I'm no climate scientist and I'm mostly talking from my ass and a few books about climate.
You can pretend that you can vote for a government that will put in place solutions for climate change, and then wash your hands of the problem. But you're kidding yourself. How would that work? Let's say the green party weren't completely fucking clueless and had policies that would actually work. They'd be banning frivolous air travel, implementing strict personal carbon budgets, shifting complete away from fossil fuels on an aggressive timeline, updating building codes to ensure that all new buildings were carbon negative, banning shit left, right and center. Are you going to vote for them? The hell you are. You would effectively be voting to enforce the lifestyle that you think I'm ker-razy for voluntarily adopting. Even though the Green Party's policies right now are milquetoast, still nobody votes for them.
I'm doing the only thing I can do. You might say that my individual contribution is negligible. You'd be right. But climate change is just the collective impact of a few hundred million people who, just like me, who are in the top x% in terms CO² emissions.
Here's the thing: I always vote for whatever party that leans towards climate action. Usually that means: absolutely nothing. They're all shit. Even if the fantasy political party did exist, and I was happy to vote for those changes (which I would!) my vote would be worth noting in the grand scheme of things because they'd get less than 1% of the vote. And whereas you tell me that my personal CO² reductions are worthless, and my vote is not, it's precisely the opposite. Every kg of CO² that I curb is literally good, but every wasted vote that has it's effective value wiped out in an election is worth literally nothing.
The fact is, I'm far, far happier giving up a luxury lifestyle that was unimaginable two generations ago. Is it really such a huge thing to give up meat? Or flying? Nope. Anyway, if things get as bad as I think they'll get during my lifetime, then I consider my current (comfortable) lifestyle "practice for the real thing when it happens".
On the other side, changing your behavior is a drop in the ocean. Everybody needs to change their behavior. But your behavior will need to change at some point so helps to do it now, and model it to your neighbors. The companies are a target for regulation, or opponents. But the behavior of consumers will have to be regulated.
They definitely have distracted people by talking about stuff like plastics and recycling. When it is energy and how it is produced that matters. A lot of stuff will become green when energy and transport is green.
>A lot of stuff will become green when energy and transport is green.
Exactly, which is why we should utilize regulation to tip the economic scales of profitability in different methods of energy production... And other such legislative tools we can use to incentivize such transitions... All of which relies not on "paper straws" but on concerted political action.
As I've commented before, the things we all consume could be produced more ecologically, at the cost of reduced profits. Which will never happen unless through legislation.
>My purchasing choices (or lack thereof) will have far more impact on co² reduction than my vote
Agree to disagree here. Heard of the EPA? What purchase can you make that has anywhere near the impact of an institution like that? (Before it was regulatory captured...)
>there isn't a single candidate, let alone party, that is going to do a damn thing about it
Patently false. Plenty has been done research and legislation wise, but since there isn't enough support to get stuff like the green new deal passed, what are we do to? Oh, elect more politicians that DO support it? Think i mentioned something like that...
>If being close to carbon neutral does nothing more than let me say "I did my best, so I'm not gonna beat myself up", them so be it
Again, not saying you should stop, just saying a conscientious actor might feel even better if you did a notably more effective action, and it might do a lot more for climate change to boot.
> I could do as I please and not worry about my conscience!
Another misrepresentation of my stance. I am not suggesting that, I'm simply suggesting political action is a much more efficacious approach. The fact you believe not a single politician cares about climate change is a depressing and inaccurate stance that does explain your position though, as much as I disagree with it.
Also some interesting deep dive about NOAA data: https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1679838210086641668
More info on this specific viral image here: https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.32FV7W7
Bottom line is that the all-green and color coded versions of this temperature map have both been used for 30 years. It wasn’t some change in the last few years to make the temperatures seem scary, as the grifter is clearly implying (and the HN user is clearly inferring).
I thought AP was being sarcastic.
Here’s their note about the broadcast the red one is from:
> The report later includes green maps, but they are focused on general forecasts and rainfall -- not temperatures.
But honestly, you don’t even need any of this context to know why the implication of the original viral post is nonsense, just a tiny bit of logic: one of these is topographical, and one of these shows heat indicated by color. They both have temperatures listed because the weather report is more useful to the people watching it that way.
If you watch weather on like any news they’re going to show you a number of different maps, all within probably 90 seconds. Temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, wind speeds & direction, topography, storm tracking maps, maybe more.
This is why countering misinformation is such an uphill battle: someone goes to substantial lengths to track down exactly the context that completely obliterates the initial implication. But the context doesn’t go viral, and people fooled by the viral post in the first place who actually see the context instantly reject or misunderstand it.