I just meant that my reduced negative externalities will be produced instead by an opportunistic actor. If half of Americans said "burning carbon is bad, I'll ride a bike instead" it would largely be making gas cheaper for the other half, who would then just buy bigger, heavier SUV's. This doesn't apply to all things, just cost-limited goods where the negative externalities aren't priced in. Plastic is basically free (not cost limited) so at least there reduced consumption kind of matters.

The other option is to run for office and effect change that way. That one just might do something.

Pretty much this.

If you want to reduce the consumption of some thing, make it more expensive.

Paradoxically: increased efficiency reduces costs and so increases total consumption. This was noted by economist and engineer William Stanley Jevons, in the 19th century.

There are different ways of increasing costs, and not all necessarily involve prices (or taxes), though those tend to be the most effective and easiest ways to do so. Legal, social, and moral costs can also be imposed (criminalising use, making use anathema, making use taboo), but these take time to impose and have various side effects.

This is a difficult problem, and even recognising the dynamic is difficult. It's deviled ecolologists, economists, politicians, and others, for over two hundred years (and arguably, for over two thousand).

Smaller scale of production usually decreases efficiency, increases costs, and thereby decreases consumption.

That depends on what's prompting the smaller-scale activity.

If increased capabilities allow more parties to engage in an activity, you'll increase total consumption.

If increased costs reduce the effective maximum scale of operations, you'll tend to have reduced consumption.

One formulation I've come up with is that "bad hygiene leads to decentralisation", where hygiene is meant in the general sense of systemic health and efficiency. Anything that reduces the capability of scaling up operations will lead to more and smaller rather than fewer and larger units of operation. This is something that proponents of decentralised systems might want to consider.

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/36518392

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7h8sqk/open_th...

> I just meant that my reduced negative externalities will be produced instead by an opportunistic actor.

I don't think this is true. Humans are deeply social and copy each other. One can easily see this with young humans, but I didn't fully appreciate this with adult humans before I saw it myself. When I turned semi-custom-vegan, I did hear that it is kind of pointless because animals will still be slaughtered for others. But even suprising to me it turned out that several of the people I interact with started to reduce their meat consumption as well. We aren't all egoistical ignorants that only think of their immediate benefit.

When I cycled to work in LA people seemed more keen on terrorizing me on the roads, or joking about killing me in the office, than on copying me.

If half of the current car owners in the US stopped driving, it would have consequences on a global scale. Presumably they'd also stop buying new cars, for one thing...

But that example is extreme. There's strength in numbers, even smaller ones. If 5% did what you describe, there'd be that much more people demanding streets that are safe for biking, etc.