Because the alternative is ultimately "Everyone probably won't get to stay alive". Which is a pretty big change in one's way of life.

Also, using cans instead of bottles isn't exactly a major shift in most people's life. It's infinitely recyclable (unlike plastic), something nature knows how to deal with (unlike plastic) and often better for the beverage (in the case of beer at the very least).

The alternative is the government intervening to internalize externalities. For example, a revenue neutral carbon tax or deposits on food/drink containers.

This is actually a better approach. But it's extremely hard politically. If we did this gas would be 12-20 USD a gallon, and we'd have a better world.

Easy to say from an ivory tower, but in the real world people have to get to work every day.

Which is why I realize it's a political nonstarter. I think we're in agreement.

Yeah -- in an ideal world everyone could afford to live near where they worked.

One way to encourage just that sort of city planning is, in fact, to price externalities appropriately. It's not actually cheaper to build and live in sprawl, it's fantastically expensive. But we don't charge those costs based on usage.

I can spend 400k to buy a nice four bedroom house with a garage and a basement on half an acre sixty miles from work, or 400k to buy a beat down 1 bedroom condo ten miles from work (nothing near the area where I work is under 900k)...

That's not really a city planning issue, it's just the way things are in hyper-urban areas.

I hope so much that I can pull off a remote job in the next year or so -- believe me, I'd rather never drive if I could.

If you had read the OP I was replying to, you would see they were suggesting everyone should buy and carry a Nalgene water bottle with them at all times, in case they needed water.

If you read further down this thread, many commenters in this thread are convinced that we should never package water.

"Never" is a strong word.

Packaged water is useful when stockpiling for or responding to natural disasters (hurricanes, wildfire, tornadoes, earthquakes), emergency evacuation camps, places where safe, clean water and filters aren't easily accessible or used. Everywhere else, it's really unnecessary.

Ah, the answer I was looking for when I posted! I've long preferred cans (they seem to get and stay colder to me, although that may not be true), but wasn't sure about the environmental impact.

I refer to beverage cans as "micro kegs."

It's not exactly a crazy change to one's way of life. As recently as when I was a kid, people drank water out of cups. When we were out in public, we'd use a water fountain.

Carrying a water bottle with you everywhere you go is another option, but probably not strictly necessary unless you're currently trying to pass a kidney stone.

It's irrational, but people still talk about corporate responsibility in the same language they use to talk about the morality of their own and other people's behavior. Changes like these help establish the cultural consensus that environmental damage is a bad thing that should be avoided even if it means we have to invest cost and effort in change.

Shaming backfires.

Whereas snobbery works great. The successful (advertising) campaigns target the cool kids (opinion leaders).

Lifestyle change is possible: littering, disposable bags. One could go on.

That's useful, however, that's not even close to the order of magnitude of lifestyle change required to counter climate change. Instead of not littering, think not using a car; instead of banning disposable bags, think banning beef; one could go on - restructuring cities to use less transportation, drastic reduction in air transport (so, no overseas travel for most people), etc. Sure, such lifestyle change is possible as well, however, instead of a fraction of people who currently volunteer to do it, we need to ensure that the vast majority of global population do so, and we need to ensure that they do it quickly enough. Which is unlikely to happen without massive coercion.

This sort of thinking is the exact problem. It works from the point of "what should we do if we think environmental concerns are the biggest priority". IMo the correct lense should be "what is the minimal amount of change/political capital we need to achieve our objectives for the environment", for different targets.

I agree that "what is the minimal amount of change/political capital we need to achieve our objectives for the environment" is a very good perspective to apply.

However, from that perspective is obvious that "littering, disposable bags" isn't even in the same ballpark. IMHO it would be counterproductive to motivate people with such goals, since if the end result is that they stop littering, switch to reusable bags and think "yeah, now I've done my part"... it's wrong, they're still contributing about 99% of the damage that they used to do, it's nowhere close to sufficient. Right now (unlike, say, the 1980s) the minimal amount of change is very, very large - currently, achieving our objectives for the environment requires changes that would be considered radical by pretty much everyone, and political capital that no current leader has.

Raise the gas price by a few percent, and you get rioting in the streets. Would anyone have enough political capital to double the gas price, so that people actually burn significantly less oil? And would the transport reduction achieved by merely doubling the gas price be sufficient to reduce the emissions? IMHO the answer to both these answers is a clear NO, the minimal amount of change needed is larger than the maximal amount of change for which we have political capital.

But all of the things you advocate for in your previous post are things that could be achieved with less pain.

Even the fuel tax, while the goal is to drive change, you can drive change by rewarding the desired behaviour (e.g. a revenue-neutral gas/carbon tax that paid back to low income folks), rather than punishing people. Maybe not as drastic a change since you don't get people not driving because they can't afford it, but it would incentivize doing something else to the same extent.

Or we could be much more aggressive about moving people to electric cars. Or we could simply invest more money/energy into making public transport better.

We could say try and convince people to fly less, or we could legislate carbon offsets for air travel.

So while, yes, serious change is needed, I think we really need to think about this from a political angle, rather than a moralising angle.

I would avoid even touching the diet angle if you want people to listen to you and not write you off. Meat does contribute noticeably to global warming, but food is culture, it is the hardest change to achieve, so we should really leave it to last, politically. It would be far better to deal with meat in an overall carbon tax solution, rather than singling it out as a thing people have to change.