What do you suggest for someone (not me) like this that lives in a rural area, can barely afford their current junker of a car. Has not public transport options because they live in a rural area, can’t live without a car because it’s how they get to work, and how they get their groceries. Should they just build a well functioning and competitively priced public transport system?
And maybe a more important question. If they have a chat with you, do you have to disregard their idea’s if they didn’t take steps to minimize their own consumption? What if they were good idea’s? And why can’t you discuss these things with someone and assume that the people you are talking to have already taken steps in this regard? Who made you the gatekeeper of the climate change discussions?
I would not dissregard their ideas, but if they are taking no steps within their means then I would certainly take them less seriously. I assume nothing, I ask questions, which is exactly what I did here. I am no even remotely positioning myself as anything in the climate change discussion. Those are your words.
You did not ask a innocent question. That question clearly had some intention behind it. We’ve already established that what you asked is impossible to achieve, so why ask this rhetorical question?
Making personal sacrifices within your means to curve oil consumption is impossible? Or are you reffering to my initial question about not using any hydrocarbon products wich was, as you have so clearly grasped, oviously meant to initiate a conversation about personal involvement and clearly not meant to be literal.
The petroleum industry is worthy of much criticism for covering up the evidence of climate change, killing activists, destroying the oceans with spills etc. The cursed effects on politics are well known - damning lands that sit atop oil to invasion, corruption and regressive politics and economic stultification/dependence.
That being said, I think it’s worth reflecting on how we got here as a species. Petroleum isn’t evil in and of itself - in the beginning of it’s widespread use it was one of the cleanest forms of fuel available. It didn’t take much disruption of the earth itself to obtain, (prior to fracking, offshore etc. the first exploited deposits pretty much bubbled right up out of the ground). It literally saved the whales, which were being hunted to extinction for their concentrated and easily portable energy density. Prior to petroleum, wars were being fought in one way or another over which groups controlled scarce arable land, oil drove methods for creating artificial nitrogen (fertilizer) vastly increased the amount of the earths surface that could be farmed. Prior to that point the global population was pretty much capped by the natural nitrogen cycle. This scarcity drove the empires of the time to claim rocks in the middle of ocean for their concentrated piles of bird droppings - then a major precursor of gunpowder. Oil has been the planets reserve energy supply that allowed humanity to grow in numbers and knowledge to the point where we are now - where we have the ability and the dire need to ween off oil or be cooked off the planet by our own exhausts.
Wind and solar alone aren’t going to suffice for the energy needs of humanity (even with radical restructuring that itself entails huge energy costs), ergo. squeezing few more years of use an old clunker car might well be less energy than a new Tesla. We’ll need every tool that we can come up with in combination, along with becoming more efficient wherever possible. With luck nuclear fusion in one of the many forms being investigated will prove feasible. We’ll still need sources for industrial lubricants and polymers that don’t have alternative sources to hydrocarbons. (This is something that I’ve been trying to investigate (unsuccessfully so far, available industry and government sources have scant details on what proportion of plastic production is economic bycatch) - estimating what the true costs (i.e. non-energy industry subsidized costs) of essential plastics are/would be in a hypothetical zero-energy demand petro market).
I was referring to that question, yes. Your intention there reads very different then what you claim to want to do. The intention comes off as your trying to disqualify the person your talking to by ousting them as a hypocrite. Frankly I find it very hard to believe that wasn’t your intention. So that “obviously” in your last answer is misplaced to say the least.
Edit to add:
Just to be clear, when you say “meant to initiate a conversation about personal involvement” do you mean personal involvement in general, or @heng’s personal involvement? Because, it very much seems like the latter.
There are no steps within an individual’s means that would make a big enough impact even if everyone did them
The vast majority of carbon emissions are not from things like “eating meat sometimes” or “driving a gasoline car.” They are from things like “not freezing to death in the winter” and “relying on a vast industrial infrastructure that you take for granted, and which, if you think buying that local organic potato is actually making a difference in climate change, you have no understanding of.”
This. People who don’t get this have never actually examined the numbers.
Lets assume what you say is true lets assume that the decisions within our grasp could only hope to get us a third of the way there, does that mean we should not still make the effort and sacrifice to do our part?
Maybe communicate more clearly next time, because what you wrote was obviously widely interpreted as an insulting question intended to stifle, not inspire, conversation.
We should obviously make all the the sacrifices we can in order to improve our personal impact on the system. But not to the detriment of our possible impact on the system as a whole.
I think we are never going to get 100% of the people on board to change their individual actions. I mean, just look at those guys driving their coal powered cars. Do you think they will voluntarily cut their emissions?
So I think it’s much more important to get as many people as possible on board with the need for systemic changes. And you don’t do that by first testing to see if they have made as many personal sacrifices as you did.
You don’t do that by derailing the conversation to first have a dick measuring contest to see who is currently sacrificing the most.
And don’t forget, creating the will and pressure for systemic change is also something that individuals can influence. No-one is advocating people sit on their hands and wait for the problems to fix themselves
This is basically my point. The only part here that seems to be confusing you and others is that you are differentiating US from THE SYSTEM a little too much. We are an integral part of the system and not even remotely seperate from it.
I have no doubt you are completely right about both these points. In fact, you can currently buy lead additive to put it back into gasoline since some older cars that people love will not run without it. They drive around pumping lead imto the atmosphere but at least they are now the outliers.
I don’t dissagree that getting as many people on board to change the system is a good thing so long as they understand they are part of it and are willing to put skin in the game and not just talk about what others should sacrifice.
If you see that then you completely missed my point. I have not posted a laundry list of what I personaly do in order to compare. Saying “make sure you are doing something real as opposed to just talking about it” is hardly a “dick measuring contest to see who is currently sacrificing the most.”
I belive that is exactly what I am attempting to do by pointing out that seeing the system as a separate organism than ourselves leads to either complete failure or massively slower effect. I am basically advocatimg for the opposite of the “thoughts and prayers” phenomenon.
I can certainly understand that. I can sometimes come accross a bit harsh but it comes from being raised in a childhood with very little bubblewrap and not from a desire to derail what is my favorite forum.
The reasonably intelligent and experienced people @DukeTrout mentions can spot it from a mile away, especially since it’s been a go-to silencing tactic of climate-change denialists and the fossil fuel industry for decades. It’s a mainstay in all the Koch-funded outlets and wingnut welfare institutions.
This is a perfect example of why your primary assertion is wrong. No amount of individual consumer action was going to get tetraethyl lead out of our gasoline. That change was unpopular among the general population and was championed by environmentalists (who, BTW, you’d be gaslighting right now if it was contemporary to this discussion) who were considered extremists at the time. But the EPA contained actual scientists at the time who saw the effect of leaded gasoline and drove the change to remove it from the gasoline supply as a government mandate.
Probably enough that you get to make broad, sweeping generalizations about him or anyone else here.
I am not discounting shit. I am pointing out that (once again) YOUR ideals are a luxury that many, MANY can’t afford and all you’re really doing here is looking down your nose at those who can’t afford the luxurys that you can.
Not everyone is in a position to do so, no. The working poor do not have the set of options people with means do.
For some people “making personal sacrifices” means that their kids go hungry or they become homeless or they watch their children gasp for air because they have asthma and can’t afford their medicine. Or now, they have to go to their low wage job and risk bringing a disease home that could kill a family member.
Your ideals are a luxury, and assuming everyone has the same opportunities as you to be more ecologically minded is flat out NOT understanding where the problem actually lies. Piecemeal individual actions will only do so much. Systemic change is needed.
