Theres are 100s of thousands of people who are dedicating their lives to climate change.
There were 14,000 journal articles referenced in the IPCC. There are 10s of thousands of carbon sequestration projects registered under the kyoto protocol, there are efficiency and climate change folks in most big companies, there are whole industries built around clean energy.
Not everyone has a choice, but if you can, id say the most important thing is to find work that helps, rather than focusing on individual solutions.
That’s a good point. I think it’s a little high. And, this may be weird and may be problematic or not, but I’m not sure men should get full credit on that.
I think this is more of a personality thing. You could try harder and have a lower footprint, or work on lowering other people’s, and theoretically you could reach some different level where you are content with what you’re doing and not feel guilty, or maybe you can’t get there or the way to get there for you will have to come from something else other than your carbon footprint.
I try not to do too much of what I think is a problem, and I really try to be honest about it, but I don’t beat myself up about it.
It’s impossible for any individual to do anything about these systemic problems on a personal level. I mean you could literally drop dead right now, have a zero carbon footprint and everything about climate change and global exploitation and so on would continue totally unabated. It’s a recipe for misery to constantly worry over problems that you are totally powerless to solve.
As for the question “why make any changes then”, it’s because that’s how cultural change takes place. For example, I have been taking steps to reduce my meat consumption as of late. I have tofu in my fridge right now for basically the first time ever. What drove me to do this is not that I learnt more about how meat is bad for the environment and ethically questionable and so on. I know all that already. What’s changing my behaviour is that, well, my girlfriend is pesc, there was a thread on here discussing how people are eating less meat, my friend’s wife has also gone pesc, their son is vegan, etc etc. As a result of this it seems to me there is a cultural zeitgeist in the direction of eating less meat and that influences my behaviour. That’s how cultural change happens. My convictions will then change in accordance with my behaviour. It’s like how voters often don’t make up their minds on issues and then select a candidate who accords with this. Instead, they figure out who they want to vote for and then decide what they think about issues on the basis of this. As long as I eat meat, I’ll handwave away the problems with doing it. If I eat less meat, the problems with doing it will become more salient to me. In both instances I tend to want to justify my own behaviour.
So going back to how people decide how far to go in ameliorating their behaviours which cause harm, it’s that they don’t want to be alienated from the culture they’re in. This is not irrational, since they can’t individually do anything about the problems anyway and isolating yourself from the prevailing culture is also not helpful in changing minds (think about the stereotypical militant vegan being self-righteous at people).
So your individual choice didn’t do anything, but your girlfriend’s choice is starting an eating revolution. Maybe you should assign some percentage chance to your choices that they’ll cause some exponential changes and then give yourself the expected value of your influence as well as credit for your own personal changes.
I do, but that influence happens collectively and from within the culture. My girlfriend’s behaviour influences me where PETA activists do not.
Stuff like strikes can’t function that way. They’re useful if a government is subverting the will of the people, or to get visibility and support for a minority grievance. Climate change is an issue that affects everyone. A mass movement to get people to do radical things like strike is way harder to organise than a mass movement to get everyone to vote for effective climate policy, and in our countries we can’t even manage that.
It might be that our societies are incapable of responding to climate change in time. The fact that this is unpleasant doesn’t make it not true and doesn’t mean we should wallow in despair about it. Everyone I know is going to die, many of them suffering debilitating conditions like strokes and cancer in the meantime. I don’t spend my days in agony thinking about this. The difference with climate change is just the illusion - and that’s what it is - that you’re capable of doing very much about it.
It should be obvious, for example, that if I teleported you back into the 1950s, there is no possible technique by which you could make gay marriage a reality within 5 years. Even though you know for a fact that it’s possible to get a majority of a population to approve, cultural inertia is also a real thing. There’s a rate beyond which further acceleration of change just will not happen.
Sure, but does that contradict anything anyone here has said? I guess just saying that people shouldn’t be too upset if things don’t change immediately? Because they wont? Or that changes over a short period are small. I think ~everyone knows that.
What are you currently doing? Only asking as I have learned that barely surviving has helped me become waaaaay more efficient at conserving energy and resources.
I should be taking cold showers (weakness on my part) but I do catch the warm up water in a bucket and use it to fill up the toilet after flushing.
I don’t have a dishwasher so not wasting there. Also have learned to start with the bare minimum of soap water and use the rinse to also fill up the unwashed dish pile.
I use a bare minimum of plastic containers but use everything twice that isn’t efficiently recyclable (currently).
I make sure and keep up with all the plastic bags that can be recycled with grocery bags. That’s pretty much everything that isn’t made for frozen.
I’ve gone vegetarian. Impossible sausage > real sausage. The impossible beef makes a pretty good patty.
I cook everything with a lid on the skillet and try not to waste an iota of residual heat.
My point, in answer to Chads, was that I think it’s rational to want to stay broadly within the confines of the culture in which one lives, because living a life outside of that culture is alienating and in the case of climate change accomplishes nothing. Chads was arguing that one’s lifestyle ought to be determined by the consequences of one’s behaviour when scaled up to the global population.
You’re not really arguing that, or not well. It’s 1950. Your gf just enlightened you about eating meat. You’re going to enlighten someone else. 70 years later people will all be enlightened. Your gf not eating meat wasn’t nothing.
I don’t think that’s wrong, practically or morally. But sure, Chads shouldn’t expect too much and shouldn’t be miserable just because it’s difficult, takes a long time, or might not even be possible. Like you said, we’re all going to die - and the deaths I’ve seen have all been pretty horrible. Still…
Right, my point is that just because my gf influenced me by being pesc, it doesn’t follow that she would influence me even more by being vegan. There’s a rate of change beyond which it’s easier for me to be hostile and rationalize my existing behaviour than countenance changing.
Well the way I’ve described it is the way I think about it. I accept my own fundamental inability to do anything about it. Like I am a Greens member, I go to branch meetings off and on, I spend my election day handing out campaign material, I am basically a single-issue voter on climate change. So if I am looking at some behavioural change and thinking “fuck that, too hard, too disruptive to my life and won’t achieve anything in isolation anyway” I can be extremely sure that that’s also going to be the attitude of the 90% or so of the population who are more complacent than I am. I think going above and beyond at that point is basically retreating into a fantasy of having power to change things when you don’t have that power.
Off-topic, but this was also my criticism of the Abolish The Police movement, that it was (and I think I can say “was” now, after that Senate vote the other day) masquerading as a political movement but was actually a fantasy constructed to soothe the pain activists feel at their powerlessness in the face of the intractable problem of law enforcement in the US.
This isn’t about what Chris said but a general comment.
I feel like the “individual actions mean nothing” argument is way overplayed and partially a result of the age of extremism. It’s true that If corporations aren’t held accountable then waaf but it’s not true that individual actions don’t affect that possibility.
I’m not even sure why the arguments are treated as mutually exclusive unless it’s to assuage ones guilt. I guess we all are clinging on to the current world in some way or another.
This is related, but I don’t think that’s clear. I think a branch of a movement that is very radical can be quite helpful. A lot of cities cut police funding and I don’t think that happens without Abolish. And people may think something is nuts today, look back on it as not so nuts, and it may well have been that the best way to get there was a period of people thinking it’s nuts.
It’s possible. It’s an argument that has the virtue of being unfalsifiable. I think of this as analogous to the Great Man theory of history, in that I think that it’s more typical that radical movements are a symptom of broader social forces rather than being the cause of them. But history is complicated and it’s probably both to some degree.
