That’s really my biggest problem with most green parties / organisations. There is an emphasis on individual action that is just unreasonable. Climate change won’t be affected by individual change, since it really is a systemic problem. No amount of green consumption or efficiency will do as much as a dent in the problem of global warming.
Our energy and supply chain transport infrastructure needs to be overhauled which will cost a lot of capital investment and strip off a lot of planned profits from the books. These are the issues that need to be addressed. Whether Joe Blogs drives a SUV is inconsequential.
You can’t use your wallet to vote against the financial incentives that keep the polluting infrastructure running.
If every person wouldn’t drive any car, fly, go on cruises and eat meat all corporations would produce 99% of total global emissions -.-
So tell me, in the situation you are describing, how would you do your job and care for yourself or the people you like / who depend on you without access to e.g. a car?
I don’t understand how you do not seem to care why those emissions, that cause global warming, take place in the first place?
We need cars because our society has decided for us that they should be incentivized. Public transport is a mess (and not very affordable) and many railways in western Europe have been decommissioned. We could have modern society without cars, or at least without everyone needing to have one.
Most emissions is not due to a person’s activity but to industry. The scale of waste is unprecedented: just consider for a second the environmental impact of surveillance capitalism: of all these Google/Facebook/NSA servers running exactly ZERO useful services for users/society, of all the CCTV cameras and other control mechanisms deployed in the streets. Add to this mix:
- that most companies/jobs are utterly useless or destructive
- that planned obsolescence across industries means even when we produce too much we’ll keep on wasting
And you start to have a basic explanation of what’s fucked up about capitalism destroying our planet.
That’s exactly right. The problem is largely systemic and clearly linked to the way we run our economy.
It might be hard to believe today, but humans lived for millenia without any cars. Sure they are necessary in many places now, but that will probably change drastically after peak oil is reached (because renewables can never provide enough energy to power electric cars for everyone).
I didn’t phrase this correctly. My point wasn’t that cars are needed in a general way.
My point was that most people, as of today have some dependency on cars, whether they like it or not. People by large have not been involved in the Urban Design decisions that shaped the cities in the last 100 years or so.
I further want to add that even if more people would decide to go without a car (and I believe that this in many countries is actually what is happening), the impact on global warming would be minimal.
Also I think you are correct in saying that the current way of using cars will change in the future drastically.
So in summary, if we care to put effort into avoiding the worst of climate change, we need to address the areas where the damage is done, which is industry. As I stated above, we haven’t done this in the last 40 years and I feel that the “personal responsibility” approach was something that actually caused significant problems and side tracked meaningful action.
I have a bicycle and a train flatrate, never needed a car except for moving where Ihad to rent a small truck anyways.
Sure, for most of my life I didn’t have a car either. But that’s not really the point. Some life circumstances are outside your own control. The point I poorly tried to make was more that people are driven by their current circumstances. Climate change is a systemic problem. You can’t rely on people reactively fixing climate change 8 billion times in their own little yard. It just won’t happen.
My point was that if individuals make up for less emission non-individual actors will automatically make up for more of the total emissions, so the screenshotted post is kind of silly.
I’m sure there will probably be no substantial change (at least in time) if we just let consumers decide, but that doesn’t except them from being responsible for driving around in child-killing, cancer-inducing, environment-destroying and fossil-fuel-wasting private tanks.
The point of the screenshot comment is that we are not focusing on the right things when discussing climate change.
There are lots of issues with SUVs but to say that some end product is the real cause of the problem (talking about climate change, not cancer here) is just inaccurate. It is the tremendous industry that was built, the associated physical assets, and the associated economic and financial incentives.
Live in a place where cars are not necessary? America was really the pioneer of forcing people to live in places where if you dont have a car you can’t advance in society.
Not everyone can just move somewhere else. People have families, social responsibilities and also not always the resources to move to a different part. Further, legal freedom of movement is not a given for everyone.
i’m not really sure what is this supposed to mean
yes, a corporations produce b percent of all emissions, so what? if there was only one corporations it would produce 100 % of all emissions, doesn’t change the situation whatsoever
the strategy to scaling down emissions doesn’t change depending on the distribution of emissions
Of course the strategy changes.
If one corporation would produce 100% of emissions you would be able to discuss how to wind it down. How to manage the impact of winding it down.
Instead we are talking about whether you, the singular you, wasted too much water having a shower.
This is absolutely absurd.
this is a false dichotomy, of course many problems have to be fixed on the supply side, but a lot have to also be fixed on the consumer side, for example animal product consumption: no matter how you restructure corporations, earth simply doesn’t have enough resources in order sustain an omnivore diet for more than a few hundred million people
the 100 - 70 gotcha points out a valid problem, while also for some reason disregarding the other side of that problem 🤷♀️
Consumers wouldn’t be using single use plastics if corporations didn’t push it on everyone.
How about stuff like milk cartons that added a plastic cap to the cardboard? It always worked fine opening the cardboard top and I would always use it up long before it spoiled. The plastic added nothing to the shelf life and just created more waste. Now every carton like that has a plastic cap.
i agree, you listed problems that should be fixed on the supply side, this doesn’t mean there aren’t problems that should be fixed on the consumer side 🤷♀️
Oh yeah because consumers can economically recycle plastics, right.
consumers can’t recycle plastics, nobody can, there are problems that cannot be fixed on the supply side, and single use plastics isn’t one of them
So how is it the consumers responsibility?
I don’t think that this is a false dichotomy at all, it’s clearly a matter of strategy and history showed that the wrong strategy was chosen.
For 40 years we are focusing on individual action as a mitigation strategy. This failed thoroughly.
The reason why we have not addressed global warming in any meaningful manner is that we failed to discuss the economic and financial incentives that keep the problem running. And we failed to discuss in meaningful ways the actions that are actually needed to mitigate climate change, namely wind down the fossil fuel industry.
Whenever that topic somewhat came up, the narrative immediately changed to what this would mean for the individual and what the individual can do to facilitate this change.
We failed to discuss the costs of winding down these industries, including how to assist workers in those industries to manage the change. We failed to address the financial impact of turning off capital intensive infrastructure that was built with the premise of someone making profits for 40-60 years off that asset. And we failed developing a large scale technology transition plan, that also shows how underdeveloped countries can improve their quality of life without going down fossil fuel way.
