And then rue in the fact your individual, or even the individual contributions of the personal lives of all citizens, are a sliver of a pie dominated by agriculture, manufacturing, and resource extraction. Almost all of which have much less impactful changes to make that aren't lifestyle shifting but who are not incentivized to without the regulatory initiative to force them to.

Make whatever changes in your life you want, "every little bit helps", but remember that individual willpower and grit is taking a cup of water out of an ocean. You don't change the tide that way, you need to recognize the importance of political action to see the situation improve.

For everyone who goes vegetarian instead of attending town halls or petitioning their representatives or staying home from protesting business waste they are missing the forest for the trees on what matters in environmentalism.

>And then rue in the fact your individual, or even the individual contributions of the personal lives of all citizens, are a sliver of a pie dominated by agriculture, manufacturing, and resource extraction.

Agriculture, manufacturing, and resource extraction all exist to serve consumerism society.

Our personal individual contributions might be just a tiny slice of it, but aggregated individual contributions are 100% of the problem.

Society is us.

I was wondering how much I save by working from home. We have a single vehicle, an SUV. I fill it once every 6-7 weeks because we drive so little. It's actually quite amazing how much all the savings compound simply by working from home.

I think that getting all these older managers on board with working from home as much as you can may be a colossal savings on all fronts.

Not disagreeing, but looking at global temperature readings, temps were almost flat from 1940-1980. Weren't those decades characterized by interstates and polluting cars, and people living in suburbia? At least in the US.

Was the temperature ramp-up from 1980-2019 a delayed reaction? Or due to emerging nations getting industrialized?

Graph: http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/TimeSeri...

Within climate change what you're asking about is called TCRE or "transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions". E.g. this research article should answer some of your questions. It's an analysis of historical temperature, CO^2 emissions, and the relation between the two: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_climate_response_to_...

Also note that US population was about 1/3 and 2/3 of present in 1940 and 1980 respectively. The developing world has grown a lot faster than that. So the number of people living the highest-carbon lifestyles is up while the number of people aspiring to do so is WAY up.

Not all reactions are linear. Some have discreet "breaking points", after which become visible.

Also, if we compare 1980 to today, or even 2010, it's like the stone age re: production and consumption.

Population was just 4.4B -- now it's 7.7, almost double.

Large swaths were in far more dire poverty and much less consumption. Chinese industrial production was not a thing -- now it's the biggest industrial site in the world. The whole of USSR and Eastern Europe were communist (and would be for 10 years still).

And even Americans consumed much much less than today. Consider how little gadgets and stuff the average person had in 1980. Even clothes were much more valued than today's "quick fashion". Malls where just starting to be built everywhere (now the world's a big mall, and the internet can deliver to your door in the next day, so they aren't even needed).

US production here shows more than double too: https://www.macrotrends.net/2583/industrial-production-histo...

If you live rural in a rural area, use solar for electricity, work remotely, and grow your own food you are probably producing a lot less garbage than someone in a high density major metro.

nope, and by a very long shot.

Only if you don't count second and third order effects, to tout the usual "dense urban living".

And have a vegan/vegetarian diet.

Sarah Taber explained the complexity of this aspect of dietary environmentalism better than I ever could in this thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/100636377572388864...

tl;dr: the effectiveness of vegetarian diets is dependent on local conditions. Vegetarianism in a globalized world relies on fossil-fuel-based transport or farming techniques.

And don't have kids.

I think this is a misguided sentiment, and this article sums up the reasons why pretty well: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-14/want-t...