It's always fascinating to see how many negative emotions are triggered when you advocate openness in terms of climate change. It seems to me that you are also very concerned about this topic.
I can absolutely understand you. A lot of what is done in this area is unfortunately greenwashing and is meant to make you feel good. That's why open source is so important for "impact" measurements. Conclusions based on open satellite data and open source processing pipelines are very difficult to "greenwash". Let numbers based on empirical measurements and open models decide what is actually sustainable for the climate, rather than opaque marketing.
Every action you take first creates emissions. Doing nothing often seems to be the safest way to reduce your own emissions. This gives you a good feeling that you are at least not part of the problem. An open source / open science strategy at least prevents greenwashing and allows to at least focus on measures that actually save emissions. However, as long as the systemic / economic problem behind climate change is not solved, someone else will simply create the emissions for you.
It's not completely symbolic either, little things can help too, and open source (and most importantly) open data, brings transparency which indeed allow for people to work together and build a counter power.
But then again, if you really want to do something about at your own level, just travel less (be it for work or leisure), watch less netflix and don't upgrade your machines, just replace them when they don't work anymore. That'd be start.
I hate to say it 'cos I hate those punchlines, but this time, "less is more" :-)
This would be a more useful comment if you actually engaged with the article to point out which parts you don't agree with and suggest alternatives. For example I'm very skeptical that reducing the power consumption of software is very effective; although the industry has made huge advances in low-power hardware, induced demand has meant that the overall electricity consumption of the sector has continued to increase. A lot of "sustainable" tech initatives seem to be based around that and demand shifting so you're running compute jobs at times when renewables are more widely available. The latter might be worth worthwhile as a short-term hack, but it's only a meaningful part of a solution insofar as it incentivises a faster transition to more clean/renewable energy.
When you just make a blanket statement that everything is "symbolic nonsense" it's easy to assume that you're not interested in helping, but just one of the many people who has pivoted directly from "climate change isn't real so we should ignore it" to "climate change is inevitable and so we should ignore it".
I've never been in a plane. I don't go on vacation. I don't have a drivers license. I don't feel bad, because i rarely do things i should feel bad for.
I see that people like the articles author do feel bad about it, and do some metrics like that to feel less bad about it. None of the things the author did does reduce emissions. If i wanted to reduce emissions, i'd probably not even have the tech to show me the emissions charts.
I think this is come kind of coping mechanism. Okay if you need it, but i won't pretend its more than that.
>I've never been in a plane. I don't go on vacation. I don't have a drivers license. I don't feel bad, because i rarely do things i should feel bad for.
Sounds like "symbolic nonsense to feel better about yourself". By reducing your personal carbon emissions a North American can probably go from 22 tonnes of C02e/year to maybe 5 tonnes CO2e/year. Maybe a little less if you really try. So you can cut maybe 17 tonnes / year * 80 years = 1360 tonnes over a lifetime. That's about the CO2 emissions of a plane doing 2 return trips across the Atlantic. If you're from Europe your baseline emissions are probably lower (by almost a factor of 2 between the USA and Western Europe) and therefore so are the potential savings.
Although cutting one's personal carbon footprint is a good first step, individual lifestyle changes aren't enough to make a difference. They're OK, but not more than that. Technical, cultural and political solutions are all required, and although there might be parts of the original article that are misguided at least it's trying to engage with the problem at more than an individual level.
These are important to be better equipped to tackle issues, it's no silver bullet, but in a multi-pronged approach having the right information is detrimental for a meaningful company ESG policy.
Strange that it proposes buying "climate-friendly" stuff at the end - the best approach is to not buy new things at all, and focus on reducing electronics waste, planned obsolescence, etc. - where FOSS can have a critical role.
The real "solution" will come from increasing sales tax to 25% like Sweden, increasing gasoline tax to $5 per gallon like the UK, energy tax, carbon emissions tax, fuel duty, etc. - people can't consume when they can't afford it. And necessity is the mother of all inventions afterall.
And then we can all struggle in poverty with high taxes and interest rates, whilst a few rich Americans live in luxury with their private jets and multiple SUVs, etc.
Tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, and if a country isn't signed up to this, tax all their imports the same amount, overestimate.
Then use that tax money to clean up the pollution.
Side effects: people will invent cheaper ways to clean up pollution
- producing concrete, steel, (including mining) etc is no more polluting in other countries
- producing vegetables, bananas and other stuff is interesting because you want to have them in countries that don't have them => eat local stuff
- water is the same in every country
- clothes are not less difficult to produce efficiently
etc.
so yes, we could stop importing and building stuff right here.
Now this would have two very educational effects:
- mining stuff makes your nice countryside, well, not nice. Lesson learned: yeah, you do have some footprint and you must accept it.
- building stuff paying workers at your country's rate may make things more expensive to you. Lesson learned: you must value work.
We're talking about future generations here. If it means changing our core values, then, we'll have to change them.
Do you have a source for that claim? Outsourcing doesn't seem to have to led to less pollution. Most heavy industry that has been outsourced has been outsourced to companies with looser environmental regulations and labor protections and most reporting conveniently ignores a lot of the offshore pollution (which is often hidden behind several layers of indirection to avoid accountability) when measuring the pollution caused by domestic companies.
I also wouldn't call the shredding and landfilling of consumer goods efficient and those practices seem to have largely arisen from the ability to mass produce goods cheaply making discounting them further less profitable than simply destroying them.
This also ignores the inefficiencies promoted by global manufacturing that involves shipping half-finished products around the world many times over because shipping is effectively free compared to paying for all the manufacturing to happen in one place (and handling the finishing touches domestically allows marketing the product as domestically made).
There doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correlation between efficiency (which literally just measures cost reduction, as externalities don't factor into it unless they have a price tag) and less pollution (unless you handwave carbon capture and offsetting as magic and ignore the real world effects to only focus on numbers on paper).
I think the one argument you can make is that cutting down on outsourcing will tank the post-colonial economies that are dependent on having their resources extracted and using their cheap labor to create margins for foreign markets. But that's really more telling of how exploitative supposed economic development aid has been for them by failing to restore any level of self-sustainability they had prior to colonialism.
Child labor in arsenic mines (to use a graphic but not entirely hyperbolic example) may be contributing to GDP but that doesn't mean it's desirable or that the countries doing it are better off than they would be if it weren't.
As opposed to most large corporations of the world? Corporations are literally self-serving by definition, so even moderately corrupt governments would seem altruistic by contrast.
Isn't this the effect of ignoring the externalities anyway? Except delayed until some potentially irreversible, acute threshold like the wet bubble or flooding low lying areas?
This doesn't seem viable in practice, determining how much polution a product causes for every product you tax is impractical and although not guaranteed I would think it likely that you'll simply export less when you start imposing the same taxes on the exported products.
I'd bet it would increase inequality as well, given that people with low incomes proportionally pay more taxes on bought goods and services than people with higher incomes (I'm quite certain that's the case but economics really isn't my strong suit).
You haven't weighed the consequences enough: I can afford a modern home, I built one, well insulated, with a proper VMC+heat-pump, p.v. since here is a good enough option, all-electric for cooking and heating etc so yes, I can consume without produce extra pollution and potentially publish that like that very text here. Is exactly USELESS for the humanity because those who can afford are a small percentage of all humans, and such cohort below a certain age is mostly interesting in doing so or have already done that in the recent past while an older fraction is simply not interested due to their life expectancy. MOST other humans can't, wanting or not.
That means you suggest to push more and more people to poverty, generating unrest, repressions, dictatorships "to keep the society up", witch end up like in the first part of the '900 in nazi-fascist regimes the same polluter and criminals against humanity who fund them in the past fund the same move now.
A very simple example: WFH means I can work on a desktop. A desktop means a computer that can last 10+ years in relative comfort for 99% of jobs and be destined to such jobs when not enough anymore for more demanding activities like a new desktop for a child out of the parent now-dismissed "workstation-desktop". If I have a less wealthy life probably I can't use a desktop, I might get just a craptop able to last two years maximum from some company. An EV for me might be nice: not using it every days I can mostly recharge from solar so it might be cheap enough and protect against fuel shortage around my homes if/when they'll happen. Someone who use a car daily because he/she need can't. Those who cook with gas mostly do that because that's are the tools they have and can't afford buying new ones.
FLOSS is a must not for the Earth but for us humans, to preserve Democracy, to avoid a day being locked out of our home, having lost our third-private-party provided IDs, locked out from our car etc. FLOSS principles of development, witch means public research and public money, public code, are a must to evolve in a socially sustainable manner instead of funding very few humans interests against all others BUT no, increasing prices of polluting things people's depend on is NOT at ALL a solution, it's just a way to lend in a dictatorship with a polite justification.
If we want made a genocide of so many people to save the human species we need to be loud and clear, because we need to preserve "background noise" that made natural selection and evolution possible. The idea of classical eugenics is not less harmful nor a-scientific than the classic cross marriages between nobles not only for short-term political reasons but also to preserve the lineage "purity". We can't substitute nature effectively so we need to preserve diversity and natural selection, trying to generate and artificial one with various basis is a recipe to end up in a disaster large enough to have enough potential to crash our spaces.
So you claim that increasing taxes increases civil unrest? What do you base this claim on? The countries with high taxes do not tend to be the countries that have a lot of civil unrest, low tax countries on the other hand... While that does not imply causation, it is food for thought I would say.
No, I claim increasing prices without increasing wages provoke unrest, and you can see that everywhere in the very present world. Taxes MUST BE a means to redistribute richness to avoid deepening too much the fork between richest and poorest, but for that money MUST BE a public value-less unit of measure of almost any substrate while actual money are private game, substrate of anything, and so taxes are ways to fund states that actually are just slaves of private central banks, that until some politicians decide that enough is enough and instead to play the right way organize a coup to arrest and devastate such privates criminals overnight manu militari publishing a small advise in the early morning: "anyone still fee can confess publicly it's crime against humanity in the next days or face revenge simply knowing a thing: Democracy does bring human rights, and such rights does not serve only to protect poor against riches but to protect any human being against anyone else, without substantial democracy there are no human rights so the old sword way still apply when used, against anyone, mercyless". Not something likely to happen in short times anyway.
About taxes no, Sweden have high taxes and a deep social fracture with very relevant unrest, with crimes, bombs and shooting on the streets not much differently than certain parts of the USA or Sri Lanka these days. Swiss or France or Russia (the state, not the federation) so far have far less deep fracture while have less fiscal pressure. The issue with taxes is in their meaning.
> I claim increasing prices without increasing wages provoke unrest, and you can see that everywhere in the very present world.
If it increases too much that could happen, but there is nothing that says taxes have to be increased too much.
> About taxes no, Sweden have high taxes and a deep social fracture with very relevant unrest, with crimes, bombs and shooting on the streets not much differently than certain parts of the USA or Sri Lanka these days. Swiss or France or Russia (the state, not the federation) so far have far less deep fracture while have less fiscal pressure. The issue with taxes is in their meaning.
You don't seriously think Sweden has a similar crime rate with bombs and shootings as certain parts of the US... You're watching too much propaganda if you believe that.
> If it increases too much that could happen, but there is nothing that says taxes have to be increased too much.
Let me correcting you: it's happening NOW, almost all other the world. We have already violent unrest in poorest countries and we start to have mass protests in less poor but still with not much developed social systems countries. And not due to tax increases but to mere price increase MOSTLY artificial using covid and Ukraine as excuses but partially NOT artificial due to real shortage and supply chains issues...
> You don't seriously think Sweden has a similar crime rate with bombs and shootings as certain parts of the US...
I do not think, I know, having lived in Sweden with some friends still there and having some friends in USA, surely I'm not in both places right now (I'm in France) BUT hearing their stories that's essentially the same, only handled in different ways and advertised in different ways.
> You're watching too much propaganda if you believe that.
We all do, I try my best to collect feeds for generic news to have different propaganda's to be compared and hear people from different places in general but that's is...
If you’re serious about the environment you’ll do things like:
Having fewer kids, having housemates, eating less food, buying fewer things, not driving a car, not inducing demand for services that require cars, etc
Every action you take first creates emissions. Doing nothing often seems to be the safest way to reduce your own emissions. This gives you a good feeling that you are at least not part of the problem. An open source / open science strategy at least prevents greenwashing and allows to at least focus on measures that actually save emissions. However, as long as the systemic / economic problem behind climate change is not solved, someone else will simply create the emissions for you.
I would argue that it's easier to switch energy completely to renewables than to significantly cut global energy usage. It's also more ethical solution than forcing people to live in tiny apartments and preventing them from traveling.
I'd argue that it's easier to increase energy consumption and not to worry about pollution at all, but it's not about what's easier unless you're holding the consequences constant.
> It's also more ethical solution than forcing people to live in tiny apartments and preventing them from traveling.
What does this have to do with ethics? Is "more ethical" when you bother people less?
There is nothing wrong with using lots of energy if it’s green! We should be using more energy, not less! Energy is amazing. We just have to make it from non fossile sources.
Promoting clean energy isn't mutually exclusive with reducing consumption (at least in the short-term, until clean energy is both the norm and in surplus).
However, dividing omnivorous food intake by two would probably not be possible in the long term, unless your diet is way oversized.
And it's easier to switch to a plant based diet than to be constantly hungry.
Reducing environmental impact is a marathon, not a sprint : it s much better to take actions that can be sustained in the long term than very impressive actions that are marginally more effective, but abandoned after 2 month
no one is talking about being hungry. I'm talking about reducing food waste and eating less in light of the massive obesity endemic. eating plant based can be a part of that, sure, but isn't directly related to my point.
There's only so much that a person can do to reduce emissions. And this is the big lie that big corps PR sold you: that you as individual is main person responsible.
I don't see it. Saying "consume less/differently" is not the same as saying "be poor".
> There's only so much that a person can do to reduce emissions. And this is the big lie that big corps PR sold you: that you as individual is main person responsible.
> Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have as big an impact as fixing just one of those companies.
It seem that you read nothing past the title of that article. Those are fossil fuel companies. The study contains data on GHGs that come from direct operational emissions and emissions from the use of sold products. That means that if you use a car the emissions that are produced by that usage are counted towards the emissions of one of those companies that extracted/refined your fuel.
> Saying "consume less/differently" is not the same as saying "be poor".
To have significant impact all these "eat less, have fewer kids, don't use services that demand the use of cars" is more or less "be poor".
> It seem that you read nothing past the title of that article. Those are fossil fuel companies.
Does it matter? The number matters. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions.
Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have any significant impact compared to this 100 hundred. And we haven't talked about the long tail of companies.
Individuals have been sold a lie that only they are responsible for fighting the climate change.
> To have significant impact all these "eat less, have fewer kids, don't use services that
demand the use of cars" is more or less "be poor".
Eat less, today with obesity epidemic showing no signs of stopping, doesn't have to mean being poor but can mean to be healthy. Having kids is expensive, saying that having less kids makes your poorer is divorced from logic. I can see how saying don't use services that demand the use of car can seem to be advocating for being poorer but it doesn't necessarily follow.
> Does it matter? The number matters. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions.
It seems that not only did you not read the article that you linked but you did not read my previous post to the end. As I've explained In my previous post that those 100 companies do not produce 71% of emissions. What they do produce is fossil fuel that, when burned, produces those 71% of emissions.
> Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have any significant impact compared to this 100 hundred. And we haven't talked about the long tail of companies.
So what you are saying is is that if all of the people of earth stopped using fossil fuels today those 100 companies would still be producing and burning(they'd have to since nobody else would be doing it) enough fossil fuels to produce those 71% of emissions? Why would they do that?
> Individuals have been sold a lie that only they are responsible for fighting the climate change.
I agree that the responsibility doesn't solely lie on an individual. I disagree that an individual has no responsibility. The rest of what you wrote is idiocy that, without you understanding it, advocates for being poor.
Those are good things to do, but voting for people who support stricter climate action is at least equally important. Most important decisions (taxation, building clean energy...) are ultimately done on society/government level, not by individuals.
If we get enough renewable power, electric cars and start building houses from wood (excellent way of storing carbon), then there's no fundamental reason why people couldn't still drive cars, live in fairly large apartments and so on. Reasonable amount of consumption wouldn't be a problem in such world.
And yet a lot of so-called "progressive" countries (e.g. Sweden and Germany) punish child-free workers with extremely high income tax to give handouts to parents (Barnbidrag + Kindergeld).
It's not even means-tested so they're literally taxing struggling workers to pay rich parents just for knocking out more babies.
> It's not even means-tested so they're literally taxing struggling workers to pay rich parents just for knocking out more babies.
I'm glad to inform you that besides struggling (child-free) workers there are also rich (child-free) workers. I'm sorry to inform you that besides rich parents there are also struggling parents.
It is presumably more effective to spend your time trying to solve the hard problems of science, politics and economics that lead to the problems we have today. You probably won't be very successful, but if enough people try we will hopefully have some progress.
The developed world needs domestic population growth to continue. If you have fewer children you're handing the future off to other countries (either via immigration or competition via trade or military conquest) which do not share your views on sustainability or the environment. Some of your ideas here make sense but not having children does not.
You certainly save a great deal of energy in the short term for both you and the state. Long term this is extremely destructive. If you want to see how it ends look at former/current communist countries like Russia and China.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadFind more about this under the term "Climate Shadow": https://www.mic.com/impact/forget-your-carbon-footprint-lets....
But then again, if you really want to do something about at your own level, just travel less (be it for work or leisure), watch less netflix and don't upgrade your machines, just replace them when they don't work anymore. That'd be start.
I hate to say it 'cos I hate those punchlines, but this time, "less is more" :-)
When you just make a blanket statement that everything is "symbolic nonsense" it's easy to assume that you're not interested in helping, but just one of the many people who has pivoted directly from "climate change isn't real so we should ignore it" to "climate change is inevitable and so we should ignore it".
I see that people like the articles author do feel bad about it, and do some metrics like that to feel less bad about it. None of the things the author did does reduce emissions. If i wanted to reduce emissions, i'd probably not even have the tech to show me the emissions charts.
I think this is come kind of coping mechanism. Okay if you need it, but i won't pretend its more than that.
Sounds like "symbolic nonsense to feel better about yourself". By reducing your personal carbon emissions a North American can probably go from 22 tonnes of C02e/year to maybe 5 tonnes CO2e/year. Maybe a little less if you really try. So you can cut maybe 17 tonnes / year * 80 years = 1360 tonnes over a lifetime. That's about the CO2 emissions of a plane doing 2 return trips across the Atlantic. If you're from Europe your baseline emissions are probably lower (by almost a factor of 2 between the USA and Western Europe) and therefore so are the potential savings.
Although cutting one's personal carbon footprint is a good first step, individual lifestyle changes aren't enough to make a difference. They're OK, but not more than that. Technical, cultural and political solutions are all required, and although there might be parts of the original article that are misguided at least it's trying to engage with the problem at more than an individual level.
The real "solution" will come from increasing sales tax to 25% like Sweden, increasing gasoline tax to $5 per gallon like the UK, energy tax, carbon emissions tax, fuel duty, etc. - people can't consume when they can't afford it. And necessity is the mother of all inventions afterall.
And then we can all struggle in poverty with high taxes and interest rates, whilst a few rich Americans live in luxury with their private jets and multiple SUVs, etc.
Then use that tax money to clean up the pollution.
Side effects: people will invent cheaper ways to clean up pollution
It's shocking how environmental impact and taxation are completely disconnected at the moment.
- producing concrete, steel, (including mining) etc is no more polluting in other countries - producing vegetables, bananas and other stuff is interesting because you want to have them in countries that don't have them => eat local stuff - water is the same in every country - clothes are not less difficult to produce efficiently etc.
so yes, we could stop importing and building stuff right here.
Now this would have two very educational effects: - mining stuff makes your nice countryside, well, not nice. Lesson learned: yeah, you do have some footprint and you must accept it. - building stuff paying workers at your country's rate may make things more expensive to you. Lesson learned: you must value work.
We're talking about future generations here. If it means changing our core values, then, we'll have to change them.
I also wouldn't call the shredding and landfilling of consumer goods efficient and those practices seem to have largely arisen from the ability to mass produce goods cheaply making discounting them further less profitable than simply destroying them.
This also ignores the inefficiencies promoted by global manufacturing that involves shipping half-finished products around the world many times over because shipping is effectively free compared to paying for all the manufacturing to happen in one place (and handling the finishing touches domestically allows marketing the product as domestically made).
There doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correlation between efficiency (which literally just measures cost reduction, as externalities don't factor into it unless they have a price tag) and less pollution (unless you handwave carbon capture and offsetting as magic and ignore the real world effects to only focus on numbers on paper).
Child labor in arsenic mines (to use a graphic but not entirely hyperbolic example) may be contributing to GDP but that doesn't mean it's desirable or that the countries doing it are better off than they would be if it weren't.
I'd bet it would increase inequality as well, given that people with low incomes proportionally pay more taxes on bought goods and services than people with higher incomes (I'm quite certain that's the case but economics really isn't my strong suit).
That means you suggest to push more and more people to poverty, generating unrest, repressions, dictatorships "to keep the society up", witch end up like in the first part of the '900 in nazi-fascist regimes the same polluter and criminals against humanity who fund them in the past fund the same move now.
A very simple example: WFH means I can work on a desktop. A desktop means a computer that can last 10+ years in relative comfort for 99% of jobs and be destined to such jobs when not enough anymore for more demanding activities like a new desktop for a child out of the parent now-dismissed "workstation-desktop". If I have a less wealthy life probably I can't use a desktop, I might get just a craptop able to last two years maximum from some company. An EV for me might be nice: not using it every days I can mostly recharge from solar so it might be cheap enough and protect against fuel shortage around my homes if/when they'll happen. Someone who use a car daily because he/she need can't. Those who cook with gas mostly do that because that's are the tools they have and can't afford buying new ones.
FLOSS is a must not for the Earth but for us humans, to preserve Democracy, to avoid a day being locked out of our home, having lost our third-private-party provided IDs, locked out from our car etc. FLOSS principles of development, witch means public research and public money, public code, are a must to evolve in a socially sustainable manner instead of funding very few humans interests against all others BUT no, increasing prices of polluting things people's depend on is NOT at ALL a solution, it's just a way to lend in a dictatorship with a polite justification.
If we want made a genocide of so many people to save the human species we need to be loud and clear, because we need to preserve "background noise" that made natural selection and evolution possible. The idea of classical eugenics is not less harmful nor a-scientific than the classic cross marriages between nobles not only for short-term political reasons but also to preserve the lineage "purity". We can't substitute nature effectively so we need to preserve diversity and natural selection, trying to generate and artificial one with various basis is a recipe to end up in a disaster large enough to have enough potential to crash our spaces.
About taxes no, Sweden have high taxes and a deep social fracture with very relevant unrest, with crimes, bombs and shooting on the streets not much differently than certain parts of the USA or Sri Lanka these days. Swiss or France or Russia (the state, not the federation) so far have far less deep fracture while have less fiscal pressure. The issue with taxes is in their meaning.
If it increases too much that could happen, but there is nothing that says taxes have to be increased too much.
> About taxes no, Sweden have high taxes and a deep social fracture with very relevant unrest, with crimes, bombs and shooting on the streets not much differently than certain parts of the USA or Sri Lanka these days. Swiss or France or Russia (the state, not the federation) so far have far less deep fracture while have less fiscal pressure. The issue with taxes is in their meaning.
You don't seriously think Sweden has a similar crime rate with bombs and shootings as certain parts of the US... You're watching too much propaganda if you believe that.
Let me correcting you: it's happening NOW, almost all other the world. We have already violent unrest in poorest countries and we start to have mass protests in less poor but still with not much developed social systems countries. And not due to tax increases but to mere price increase MOSTLY artificial using covid and Ukraine as excuses but partially NOT artificial due to real shortage and supply chains issues...
> You don't seriously think Sweden has a similar crime rate with bombs and shootings as certain parts of the US...
I do not think, I know, having lived in Sweden with some friends still there and having some friends in USA, surely I'm not in both places right now (I'm in France) BUT hearing their stories that's essentially the same, only handled in different ways and advertised in different ways.
> You're watching too much propaganda if you believe that.
We all do, I try my best to collect feeds for generic news to have different propaganda's to be compared and hear people from different places in general but that's is...
Having fewer kids, having housemates, eating less food, buying fewer things, not driving a car, not inducing demand for services that require cars, etc
Find more about this under the term "Climate Shadow": https://www.mic.com/impact/forget-your-carbon-footprint-lets....
use less energy, period. ideally yes, the energy should be renewable and not cause harm to the environment as well.
> It's also more ethical solution than forcing people to live in tiny apartments and preventing them from traveling.
What does this have to do with ethics? Is "more ethical" when you bother people less?
You can't significantly reduce food intake, but switching to a plant-based diet is more beneficial than many other changes.
Switching to a plant based diet is almost equivalent to eating half as much of an omnivorous diet : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06466-8
However, dividing omnivorous food intake by two would probably not be possible in the long term, unless your diet is way oversized.
And it's easier to switch to a plant based diet than to be constantly hungry.
Reducing environmental impact is a marathon, not a sprint : it s much better to take actions that can be sustained in the long term than very impressive actions that are marginally more effective, but abandoned after 2 month
The improvement is way bigger than that for most meat-intensive (e.g. American) diets.
See https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
There's only so much that a person can do to reduce emissions. And this is the big lie that big corps PR sold you: that you as individual is main person responsible.
According to this article from The Guardian, 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have as big an impact as fixing just one of those companies.
I don't see it. Saying "consume less/differently" is not the same as saying "be poor".
> There's only so much that a person can do to reduce emissions. And this is the big lie that big corps PR sold you: that you as individual is main person responsible.
> According to this article from The Guardian, 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
> Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have as big an impact as fixing just one of those companies.
It seem that you read nothing past the title of that article. Those are fossil fuel companies. The study contains data on GHGs that come from direct operational emissions and emissions from the use of sold products. That means that if you use a car the emissions that are produced by that usage are counted towards the emissions of one of those companies that extracted/refined your fuel.
To have significant impact all these "eat less, have fewer kids, don't use services that demand the use of cars" is more or less "be poor".
> It seem that you read nothing past the title of that article. Those are fossil fuel companies.
Does it matter? The number matters. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions.
Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have any significant impact compared to this 100 hundred. And we haven't talked about the long tail of companies.
Individuals have been sold a lie that only they are responsible for fighting the climate change.
Eat less, today with obesity epidemic showing no signs of stopping, doesn't have to mean being poor but can mean to be healthy. Having kids is expensive, saying that having less kids makes your poorer is divorced from logic. I can see how saying don't use services that demand the use of car can seem to be advocating for being poorer but it doesn't necessarily follow.
> Does it matter? The number matters. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions.
It seems that not only did you not read the article that you linked but you did not read my previous post to the end. As I've explained In my previous post that those 100 companies do not produce 71% of emissions. What they do produce is fossil fuel that, when burned, produces those 71% of emissions.
> Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have any significant impact compared to this 100 hundred. And we haven't talked about the long tail of companies.
So what you are saying is is that if all of the people of earth stopped using fossil fuels today those 100 companies would still be producing and burning(they'd have to since nobody else would be doing it) enough fossil fuels to produce those 71% of emissions? Why would they do that?
> Individuals have been sold a lie that only they are responsible for fighting the climate change.
I agree that the responsibility doesn't solely lie on an individual. I disagree that an individual has no responsibility. The rest of what you wrote is idiocy that, without you understanding it, advocates for being poor.
If we get enough renewable power, electric cars and start building houses from wood (excellent way of storing carbon), then there's no fundamental reason why people couldn't still drive cars, live in fairly large apartments and so on. Reasonable amount of consumption wouldn't be a problem in such world.
It's not even means-tested so they're literally taxing struggling workers to pay rich parents just for knocking out more babies.
I'm glad to inform you that besides struggling (child-free) workers there are also rich (child-free) workers. I'm sorry to inform you that besides rich parents there are also struggling parents.
You certainly save a great deal of energy in the short term for both you and the state. Long term this is extremely destructive. If you want to see how it ends look at former/current communist countries like Russia and China.