In the end, voting is the only thing that matters. Individual choices by a small minority of the population are going to be completely ineffectual without government setting policy so that doing the right thing is also doing the most profitable thing.
But despite you being wrong in your core point in my opinion, you're absolutely right about the method. (change your lifestyle, divest fossil, direct action, civil disobedience)
The reason that voting is useless is because voters don't care about the environment. Climate change is #11 in the list of top priorities for voters.[1]. Fix that, and then voting might make a difference. And you do that by making it clearly visible that it's important to you, and by convincing others that it's important to them.
1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/244367/top-issues-voters-health....
I think you wanted to write:
Climate change is #11 in the list of top priorities for voters _in the United States_...
In many countries it is a lot higher on the list of priorities.
For example, in the UK it is on the 4th place for voters [1].
In Denmark it is the highest priority in latest polls [2] (sorry danish only)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/21/environm...
[2] https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/ny-maaling-den-groenne-dagso...
Voting matters when (1) laws ensure all people have roughly equal influence when voting, (2) laws ensure voting translates into action instead of an empty gesture to appease the population, and (3) the rule of law is respected and consistently enforced.
When one or more of these is compromised, then the actions of the government are illegitimate, and there is a continuum of actions people can take beyond voting.
Writing letters -> peaceful street protests -> nonviolent civil disobedience like blocking roads -> sabotage -> violent street protests -> armed insurrection -> civil war.
So no, voting is not the only thing that matters.
But before that being vocal, determined, and incessant is what matters [1]. At first, nobody knows about you, then, nobody believes you. The climate change discourse is still not past that second stage.
[1]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
USA is spreading conservative and fossil-fuel interests propaganda all over the world, it's very harmful, but it's not some inherent "voters don't care about X". It's simply that people paid a lot of money for voters not to care about X, and much less money to make them care about X.
Voting in most of the world is just a spectacle. If someone was elected that would in fact challenge the status quo (private property and police dominion for instance) they would be instantly murdered or imprisoned in a coup d'État.
At least that's how the story goes for revolutions in Europe/US and much of our modern colonies. As Emma Goldman once said, « if voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal ».
> Individual choices by a small minority of the population are going to be completely ineffectual
This is for sure. The problems are deep and structural and no individual action (however radical) can bring change. The issue is the people profiting from human exploitation and nature's destruction (the wealthy ruling classes) will never stop until it's too late. We have to stop them. Under some circumstances, voting can be a part of this process. But most times social change comes from the people, not a piece of paper.
Some Harvard Business people suggested that we could curb this issue by a three pronged approach:
1. Open primaries to prevent minority duopolies in the general
2. Gerrymander with an open source algorithm or a "shortest split line" method
3. Implement single transferrable vote, ie ranked choice, instead of first past the post (plurality voting), which spoils votes and results in sub-par representation.
Well, that's the main attribute of representative "democracy". This system we live in was setup in 1789 by the bourgeoisie to prevent emergence of a democracy. Many Lumières philosophers were frightened by actual democracy (the rule of the people). Voltaire famously said: « The people should be guided, not taught ».
These Harvard people you mention are not wrong. They're just so deep into the status quo they can't even imagine what a real democracy would look like. Building a democracy has nothing to do with technical details. Sure, some Condorcet-style voting system would favor smaller candidates. But to me, as an anarchist, building a democracy has more to do with:
1. Direct action instead of power delegation: the belief in elections prevents people from exerting change in their environment
2. End the tyranny of the majority: there is no universal truth to life and minorities should have their place in a democracy (which is not the case in our capitalist systems)
3. Decentralize institutions: centralization is always the tool of tyrants, whether republican (French-style jacobinism) or pretend-socialist (USSR-style democratic centralism)
It was clear from the rest of your comment that you aren't one of those, but I fear they would find support in your comment. Confirmation bias would lead them to emphasize the "voting doesn't matter" part and ignore your call to action.
[edit]: Rereading your comment, you're much more clear than I originally thought about all change being grass roots. Did you edit? If not it really emphasizes this point. I read "voting doesn't matter", hitting one of my hot buttons leading me to misread your comment. We're obviously in fairly close agreement, yet my response was to spout off an angry denunciation...
No
2. Deforestation is destroying the environment: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...
3. 24 billion tons of fertile soil disappears every year: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/26/land-deg...
4. Large animals are dying out: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/10/807/223613...
5. At the other end of the scale, insects are disappearing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071...
6. This is because we're in the middle of the 6th major mass extinction event the Earth has experienced, and this is our doing: https://truthout.org/articles/sixth-mass-extinction-ushers-i...
7. And we're polluting the planet so badly, plastics are showing up inside our bodies: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/news-...
So public policy can both incentivise everyone, not only activists to make the right choices. And it can save a lot of lives.
If a suitably large group of people refuse to vote for politicians that don't support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade and other climate policies, it will lead to better outcomes.
The simple solution is to build more nuclear. When energy generation doesn’t require burning things, this solves itself. A carbon neutral grid means we can use as much air conditioning as we want. I was in Rome and France last week and “less AC” would have meant vulnerable people potentially dying in the heat.
That said, binding environmental costs to actual prices would be terrific.
But if households only generate 1/5 of overall emissions (depending on data and negligent of consumption), we might need other mechanisms.
You can control many things through taxes, but I believe this to be inefficient. I would have no problem with paying double for fuel. But that isn't the reality for most people that are dependent on cars.
Better than nothing perhaps, but I have very low expectations for this tax.
I'm reminded of how the German word for "tax" is "Steuer", i.e. steering/control, which encourages smarter thinking about tax policy because it acknowledges precisely this effect on incentives.
A carbon divided, which is to say redistributing the income of the carbon tax equally and directly to the people should at least in principle be uncontroversial because it is both socially equitable (richer people live more carbon intensive lives and thus contribute more), and it sets the right consumption incentive without taking money out of people's personal pockets (which should please conservatives).
Consumers pay some carbon taxes directly (e.g. while buying gasoline), but does this account for indirect carbon taxes (e.g. the natural gas used in making fertilizer to grow the food that the cow ate to make this burger?).
At the end of the day, a lot of our purchases are really paying for the energy used in its production at some level.
In practice, it's @#%#ed up, as usual. They didn't implement a carbon tariff, so foreign fertilizer would have been a lot cheaper than domestic fertilizer. But instead of putting a carbon tariff on foreign fertilizer, they gave domestic fertilizer a 90% exemption.
If not, go troll somewhere else.
Combined with the efforts to switch the grid to renewables (net-zero electric grid by 2040 and net-zero altogether by 2050) this should greatly reduce emissions coming from eating.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/6/20/1869105...
In fact, New York has aggressively limited the expansion of natural gas pipelines and recently both ConEd and National Grid, two major gas providers, said in response they will stop expanding their network. IMO New York's energy agencies are using this to see if they can fully eliminate fossil fuels from new development and start a phase out.
https://enerknol.com/national-grid-stops-accepting-new-gas-s...
https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Programs/Clean-Energ...
I think a lot of common sense has been lost in the design of homes. In the south of Europe homes are often comfortable with minimal or no air-conditioning because they have designs suitable for the climate. However, this means having small windows which aren't directly exposed to sunlight, tiled or marble floors etc.
This claim is incompatible the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time."
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
Fixes that really work will have to be at the source - the energy generation stage, making existing lifestyles zero carbon. Bear in mind that billions more people have yet to achieve the comfortable high-energy-use lifestyles that we enjoy.
If we stop now and find a way to get the carbon out of the atmosphere fast enough we might even have a chance to go back to the old normal, but we have to act fast. Please help to push for it!
It doesn't seem possible to do both things without failing at both with terrible consequences.
Eating beefburgers, flying Australia <-> Europe for holidays, driving a Hummer, using plastic for everything, and so on and so forth, just isn't necessary. My street has twice the number of cars it did when I was younger.
The idea that "terrible consequences" will come about from people taking the piss a bit less is really very silly. It makes me think of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch but inverted (when I were young, we had all the things...)
the solution is to buy higher quality clothes, but less often.
In the US, if you could just get more registered voters in Texas to actually vote it would completely flip the balance of power between the Dems and Republicans. The issue, supposedly, is that Texas has a "disproportionate number of young, poor, and uneducated citizens." This means that the (actually quite popular) idea that voting doesn't matter mostly benefits the party that has adopted ignorance as most of its platform.
Scared people are only going to run in panic and will do the first thing that is presented "because something must be done".
I also see that you have fallen into the trap of thinking that there is anything you _can_ do personally.
There is only one way to get what you want: build what is effectively a world government and coerce everyone to reduce their consumption. That includes people in countries such as India, China, and Indonesia. They'll need to be told by rich westerners that they can't do the things that we did to get rich. Good luck with that.
A far more practical solution is to innovate our way out of the problem. That means more cost-effective green technologies, geoengineering, and adaptive technologies (such as air conditioning, building underground, heat sinks, etc). Those would allow us to keep growing economically, maintain people's quality of life, and it doesn't fail if China or India continue on their current path.
Just to take one counter-example, the UK has reduced CO2 consumption by 38% since 1990.
> A far more practical solution is to innovate our way out of the problem
Technological approaches are part of the solution, but it's far too risky to gamble the future of our civilisation on technical breakthroughs that may or may not occur. We're up against some tough physical limits and we certainly have no guarantee that we'll get any miracle breakthroughs in the next few decades.
Besides, with our current technology level we almost certainly have the ability to solve the problem now; we just lack the political will. How would a slight improvement in technology change that?
The UK is a country, not a civilization. They don’t have to solve the same coordination problem that the entire world has.
You say "No civilization has ever voluntarily reduced resource consumption", but civilisation as a whole has not needed to before. This is the first time I can think of that we have faced a global existential threat - or at least one we can do something about.
consumption or production? also, isn't CO2 increase offset by increase in forests (that consume CO2)? so reducing CO2 should lead to reduction in forests, right?
Energy efficiency improvements and water conservation efforts have been spectacularly effective in many first world areas.
That article says we need to build a global organization that can coerce everyone reduce their carbon emissions. I don't see how my statement was incorrect.
Electrified rail.
Low CO2 concrete. Real, already used.
The list is almost literally endless.
But anyway, all of these are simply cost based choices. A carbon tax would literally overnight shift the consumer choices. And the cost effectiveness depends on the market, and that is usually the best we can get.
So I'd say it's lifestyle change, direct action and voting.
If voting doesn't matter why would giving women the vote matter?
I suppose it's possible that we get wise enough to deserve continue on as a species, but at this point I doubt it. I don't see anything in humanity that would lead me to believe it's capable of making the cohesive decisions to remedy the situation. Something else will come along in a few million years and maybe they'll do a better job of it.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-canadian-start-up-is-removing...
- get locally sourced food
- get less things; waste less; buy less
Packaging and cargo are the two big problems, one for the plastic pollution, the other for the co2 emission. It's not meat consumption.
Cutting personal driving/travel is also good but more for environmental well being - eg less noise. It will not make any big changes in the longer run.
Downsizing and less stuff will.
According to a 5 year Oxford University study, the single best thing we can do at an individual level to decbarbonise is to say no to dairy and meat.
Which "anti-war movement" or "parliament" are you talking about otherwise?
Will your movements have the same traction in India or China?
- I don't have any (direct) influence on the Chinese government. I am gonna do my part and hope that like-minded people in China will do theirs.
- A fair share of Chinese emissions are actually our emissions anyway. Haven't we outsourced our industry to China? What's the US - China trade "imbalance"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#Contemporary
1. Tragedy of the commons
When a country/company wants to make money by damaging the environment in the process, the money come to the country/company now, but the damage is spread world-wide. If the pollution would stay only in that country/city, it would be different. So, the choice is natural, especially considering government 4-year terms.
2. We always put ourselves first, rest of the city/country much further, and rest of the world... doesn't matter. What people want, by human nature, is to satisfy their own needs & comfort.
Examples:
* Why wait for a bus or use an electric bike when one can just drive a 2 tonnes car to move oneself? It's comfortable and cheap.
* USA-specific, but spreading to other countries as well: people huge SUV-style cars to transport 1-2 persons, when a small one could do the job as well.
* Norway refuses to drill for billions of barrels of oil in Arctic, leaving ‘whole industry surprised and disappointed’. Government made the right choice, but a few (prosperous already) affected by making less money complain: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/norway-oil-drillin...
* France introduces a diesel tax, to reduce pollution, which affects everybody's health. But, wait, some need to pay a little more? Let's protest! Tax was cancelled: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/11/french-protes...
* The Bełchatów Coal mine & Power station in Poland. Hundreds of people employed there, they are happy with it. Should the plant be closed to stop pollution? What about our jobs? No way! And no, getting only 20% of salary for free (basic income) and having to learn stuff to maybe find a new job in renewables is not acceptable. So, the coal plant goes on, but it's easier to point to China for doing the same (with more plants, of course).
3. Delayed effects of current actions
The environment effects of what a one person/community/country does, bad or good, are hard to see in the short term. Only the downsides are clearly visible in the present. So, taking the correct action is quite hard.
Unfortunately, I don't see how to overcome these. Would be glad to be proved wrong!
FYI, my personal environment footprint is much smaller than the average in EU/USA, but we are too few to make an impact and others won't listen/change.
What leaves me hopeless is that any lifestyle restrictions Americans might make are being vastly outpaced by population growth in countries that are doing much less (personally and nationally) than the US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Here's a solution at the international level: https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/
At the national level I believe the problem is slightly easier (though still extremely difficult). We generally have effective national institutions, so we "just" have to convince the populace that the pain is worth the gain. It's easier to stomach a little bit of pain for the common good as long as people believe that everybody else is also doing their part.
Perhaps at this point in time we could just make things work by cutting back our lifestyles: but 20 or 30 years later the grown population would again need more food and more natural resources. And hungry people don't care about changing the world but about getting food for today, sustainable or not.
What is your point? Should we kill everybody over 70 years old?
Because: there is no overpopulation, and if there was it is not caused by too many babies but by people living longer.
When it comes to CO2 by agriculture: we are eating way too much (meat).
In my opinion you're putting the bar way too high if you require anybody on this forum to only reply to a discussion when he/she not only can point out a failure in the arguments but has the correct solution as well.
Finally, you are putting some rather dubious solution in my mouth with your comment "What is your point? Should we kill everybody over 70 years old?". Of course I didn't have that solution in mind.
It is true that this is nothing we can change, but the source of the problem shouldn't be ignored.
Of course we can eat as much meat as we want. It just doesn't scale to 7 billion people.
So yes, there is overpopulation, we just cannot do anything about it. But don't dismiss the fact.
I don't agree that overpopulation is the root cause, and I'm not a fan of talking about it much either. However, assume for the sake of argument that it is:
Reducing Earth population in the long run doesn't have to involve harming anyone.
For example, we could use changes to politics, technology and culture to provide better skills, education, even healthcare and assisting the old to live longer, and assist with more fulfilling lifestyle aspirations, and generally empower as many people as we can to lead happier lives.
Much of the scientific study we have suggests that will both reduce world population and improve quality of life across the board, because of how humans make choices about reproduction.
Nobody needs to be killed, nobody needs to have medicine withdrawn, nobody needs to be sterilised or even discouraged from having children. No odious racism or elitism or eugenics is required.
It's enough, to just improve lives, and it looks very much as though humans may naturally reduce their population replacement rate in the long run.
So that leaves only the climate problem in the shorter run, for which "temporary solutions" could be good enough.
A bigger deal than population increase is that energy use is going to rise massively with just the population we have, as people move out of energy poverty.
We need to make the energy zero-carbon.
--
² i belive it was this event http://longnow.org/seminars/02019/jan/14/prospects-humanity/
By eating vegetarian you cut one or maybe several factors of ~ 0.1 out of the equation. I'm not vegetarian but have reduced my meat consumption by a lot while not having the feeling that I miss anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/vegetarian-and-vegan-d...
I believe cutting back on meat would still be a significant improvement over the current situation.
Edit: I was not talking about missing vitamins when I said "missing". I was talking about missing something as in suffering from practising self-denial.
Its complicated, but not eating meat would account for somewhere between 3-8% reduced greenhouse gas emissions. And as more of the world's population becomes "first world" demand is going to go up unless we start reducing cultural dependence on meat throughout our diets.
Meat is significantly less efficient to produce than a balanced vegetarian diet.
That entirely depends on the land, no?
Sheep and goats can thrive on land you can’t actually use for any other sort of farming. We have lots of that land here in Wales.
The most sustainable way to farm would be to open pastured cattle, pigs, and sheep which would drop manure in a fallow field and add tons of organic nutrients to the soil - as happens in nature. That pasture would then be used to grow crops the next year, as the animals are rotated to another area. When an area is only used for growing vegetables, there is a net depletion of natural nutrients that have to be supplemented with external input.
The worst part of agriculture is farming ONLY beef or ONLY dairy or ONLY vegetables on acreage. I'm going to risk being contrarian to the HN crowd - but farming can't be automated in a sustainable way. The ecosystem is far too multivariate and interrelated. Sure, you can make a smarter tractor, but that land will be barren in 40 more years. Automation only works at scale, but nature does not divide into neat discrete categories without some sort of tradeoff in biodiversity or long-term resilience
It only takes a few passes with a plow to turn it into desert, so pretty much the only way of getting calories from land in Montana is by grazing cattle or bison.
Kind of irrelevant though, ranch land in Montana only support a few cattle per square mile.
I don't know enough about Montana, but I'm mostly worried about what monoculture farms are doing to the fertility of the Midwest.
True. Unfortunately the majority of meat does not come from grass fed animals.
Particularly organic vegetarian diets need a lot of land.
Here is a land use graphic from Our World In Data that also includes information on what fraction of consumed calories and proteins are provided by the uses.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/10/Land-use-graphic-...
This graphic is used in the article https://ourworldindata.org/yields-and-land-use-in-agricultur...
My concern is that we don't have enough land for this, and the fear/threat of overpopulation is already upon us. And has been for decades.
Consider that all of the land currently used for livestock were converted. You then _also_ have all of the land used for feedstock for the livestock.
And then there's the fact that most diets globally are predominantly vegetable based anyway - meat is a rare addition.
You can't convert it, or it's already converted. Usually for corn.
The animals we eat are mostly fed by what is cultivated on the arable land, exactly because of the modern habits of everybody eating meat every day. Most of the animals never see the pastures. The demand is too big and getting much bigger.
So we feed the animals, and most of the energy stored in their food is converted to the maintenance of the life of the animal, not the meat you get when you kill it.
Compare that with feeding the humans directly (with mostly vegetarian diet): most of the animal food you grow, transport and feed to the animals never end up becoming meat.
See for example:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...
Example from ten percent law [0]:
> Sun releases 1000 J of energy, then plants take only 100 J of energy from sunlight; thereafter, a deer would take 10 J from the plant. A wolf eating the deer would only take 1 J. A human eating the wolf would take 0.1J, etc.
We can go directly from plants to people instead of using land, energy and resources to grow plants to feed animals for human consumption with 10% efficiency.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
The only way that meat could win on either metric is if livestock are able to subsist on a diet far less varied than humans; essentially if they are better able to convert lower quality feedstock into higher quality meat.
Our baseline should be what is required for a healthy body and brain. We can go up from there.
Going down from the current level is farcical. We're in a crisis.
I like me an avocado as much as the next person, but if they need a 500% tax (invented, I don't actually know) to incorporate externalities, they need it. End of.
Like, seriously. It doesn't matter what we "want" at this point. Carbon needs pricing or we are totally fucked.
No, because livestock need food too and are horribly inefficient at turning food/water into meat.
Anyway it is a worthy goal but people shouldn't think they are doing their part of they are successful. I believe the numbers are that if all cows disappeared tomorrow, that'd take care of something like 5% of our worldwide carbon-equivalent emissions.
I used to be a bit baffled how people could say "fake news" at obvious facts and data and science. Then I read something Fulton Sheen said: never think too much about what someone says, but why they say it. He made this point about atheists, saying that they only choose not to believe in God so they can continue living an evil life. The same can be said of people who deny climate change and the seriousness of the matter, or any clear and demonstrable truth really.
To be honest I hear a lot of people talking about actionable efforts all the time, but if they're so actionable, why aren't they happening? Isn't that the definition of the term?
20 years ago, Germany raised taxes on fuel, but that didn’t make anyone drive less. I’m guessing the same would happen with a tax on CO2. So I‘m favoring emissions allowances: Politics dictates a threshold of how much CO2 is permitted and gives out allowances, then the price develops on the market.
But it feels like, for those „rebellions“, capitalism is the root of all evil.
People in Germany advocating an additional tax have either never worked, payed bills, are stupendously rich, just insane or don't have responsibilities towards others.
Sorry, there is a limit on how much you can use taxes and that limit is staunchly in the red because of naive promises made in the past.
I think the current little pupil rebellion is something very worth supporting. But their demands are naive.
Your proposition would be a more efficient mechanism.
Currently there is a discussion about giving people a fixed amount of money for the additional costs this tax would cause.
What a waste of time...
It turned out the taxes are not high enough. If people really were depended on cars, but were hurt by the high taxes, car makers would sell smaller cars. They don't. Extremely big cars, totally unneeded by almost anyone, are still the most popular models. Why? Cause the costs of having and using one are not as high as you make it sound.
> People in Germany advocating an additional tax have either never worked, payed bills, are stupendously rich, just insane or don't have responsibilities towards others.
Yeah, sure. Everyone who doesn't agree with you is one of the above. It couldn't be that they tend to have a bit more foresight than you.
> Sorry, there is a limit on how much you can use taxes and that limit is staunchly in the red because of naive promises made in the past.
Taxes in Germany have never been lower than in the last 20 years for significant parts of the population. The problem in Germany right now isn't high taxes, it's low wages. A problem which hits parts of the population that usually don't even pay taxes (or if they do almost none).
No, no, and no. Cars are getting more and more efficient, and there are many affordable efficient cars today. It‘s just that people in rich countries like to display their wealth by getting a big car. But there are still people that live in the countryside, who have no other means of transportation, that‘d get hit pretty hard by even higher taxes on fuel. It‘s how they get to work, how they get their groceries, how they get to their friends‘ place.
It‘s easy to renounce something if you‘re not dependent on it.
> A problem which hits parts of the population that usually don't even pay taxes (or if they do almost none)
What part of the population exactly are you referring to? Low-income households? Tax evaders?
Which people don't buy most of the time. By your explanation many people seem to be either rich or the price of cars (over lifetime) is still too low. I don't see the majority of people being rich, so that only leaves the other option.
> But there are still people that live in the countryside, who have no other means of transportation, that‘d get hit pretty hard by even higher taxes on fuel. It‘s how they get to work, how they get their groceries, how they get to their friends‘ place.
People in the country-side are the first to state that higher rent is the price of living in a city -- to turn that around: Higher transportation costs are the price of living in the country-side.
> Low-income households? Tax evaders?
The first. You don't pay taxes below a certain income, low wages still hit you. Tax evaders are usually not hit by either.
Now you‘re just imagining things. In 2018, 36.5% of the newly registered cars in Germany were small or compact[0]. Also have a look at this statistic [1].
> higher rent is the price of living in a city [...] Higher transportation costs are the price of living in the country-side.
Exactly. Now think about this: They live in the countryside BECAUSE they cannot afford to live in the city, which ends up being cheaper even if you have to pay for a car, especially with the current housing market situation in cities.
[0] https://www.kba.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2019/Fahrzeu...
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/165065/umfrag...
To quote your first source:
> Mehr als die Hälfte aller Neuzulassungen entfielen auf die Segmente Kompaktklasse (22,0 %), SUVs (18,3 %), Kleinwagen (14,5 %) und Mittelklasse (10,9 %). Die SUVs verzeichneten mit +20,8 Prozent den deutlichsten Zuwachs in der Jahresbilanz, gefolgt von den Wohnmobilen (+15,5 %) und der Oberklasse (+12,4 %).
SUVs were the second biggest segment and had the highest increase. The third highest increase was for luxury cars. 36,5% for small or compact also means over 60% weren't small or compact. Your source seems to support my conclusions pretty well.
> Exactly. Now think about this: They live in the countryside BECAUSE they cannot afford to live in the city, which ends up being cheaper even if you have to pay for a car, especially with the current housing market situation in cities.
Most poor people live in cities. People in the country side usually live there because they want big houses and "live in the green", not because they cannot afford rent. On the contrary, poor people usually have to live in the city despite the high rent, cause that's where low-wage jobs exist.
Not quite. You said „which people don‘t buy most of the time“ (referring to efficient cars), which could not be more wrong judging by both of my sources. But sure, people by SUVs, which I never denied. In fact, I also think that‘s a bad thing.
> Everyone who doesn't agree with you is one of the above.
It was no judgement. I was also on that train a while ago.
> The problem in Germany right now isn't high taxes, it's low wages.
Partially agreed. There is no reference as to what constitutes too high taxes honestly, but the point stands. Having low wages doesn't really allow for tax increases either.
> Taxes in Germany have never been lower than in the last 20 years
Not true at all. Income taxes maybe, but not overall tax contribution. What I mean is the quota of all taxes combined (Steuerquote). We are setting record after record here. We can be proud of ourselves...
And yes, this all requires drastic lifestyle changes. That's the point. No lifestyle change, no climate effect. Simple as that.
That is a huge part of the criticism against a tax for households that are just responsible for 1/5th of emissions and I wouldn't include them in the emission trade at all. Because even today people don't waste significant energy for basic needs like heating, so any instrument can only be that effective.
And corporations are currently the only ones paying for every tonne of CO² they emit. And you want to change that to be extended to everyone... You might argue that they should pay more, but...
Of course people in many political parties are rubbing their hands that you actually want to increase tax burdens. Money solves problems, right?
So Marxists try to make it come true, by doing destructive things like the rebellion.
The system already exists, isn't it? The so called "cap and trade" https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en
But the cap is too high and the prices are too low. Would you accept it's ok to rebel to force the politicians to lower the cap?
But also, wouldn't a lower cap lead to the "drastic life style changes for people" anyway (at least in the short term while the economy adapts)?
Yes, but not for all industries.
> Would you accept it‘s ok to rebel to force the politicians to lower the cap?
If people rebel for realistic solutions I‘m all for it!
> wouldn‘t a lower cap lead to the „drastic life style changes for people“ anyway (at least in the short term while the economy adapts)
Yeah, probably! Surely not to the same extent like the carbon tax demanded by climate activists. But the idea is to incentivize companies to find more climate-friendly solutions. Certainly some companies would lose their competitive ability if they depend on high emissions, though.
But the reality is that there many, many things to do that are more effective before even starting to look at aviation.
I don't understand the point of calling for "civil disobedience" (which is usually an euphemism for blocking roads and airports, and alienating public opinion in the process). What does it achieve? If you want to use your individual power do it constructively by changing your everyday routine and behaviour.
Yes, that's the usual 'argument' except that this does not even seem to be true (return flight from London to New York seems to emit about 1t per passenger when a typical Brit otherwise contributes 7+t, so that's 1/14th of personal annual emissions per flight).
In any case, not everyone flies over the Atlantic every year, so that overall and in the grand scheme of things aviation should not be held as a priority.
Focusing on aviation is a distraction.
While I do think it's mentioned more than it should be, it can't be denied that it's a major factor.
It is not as hard as: just stop driving with your car to work! Hmmkay?!
The issue is that it focuses on something that is not a priority and it is so largely on ideologically grounds.
Your second sentence is actually highlighting a real aspect of the issue: Many people prefer to do something easy rather than something effective.
We have been systematically strip mining the planet for decades. We need to take a step back and calm down.
If you're banging through your credit card, you knock it all out. You start from the bottom up, not the top down. You look at what you absolutely need and slowly add things back in.
We've hit the credit limit on our ecosystem.
We need to put our countries on a 'war footing'. We have so many people who could be working to fix these problems stuck in offices doing stuff that there isn't really a need for (i.e. most all software development) because that's what the 'market' rewards. We need to completely overhaul what we think of as value and how we reward it. I don't see how that's possible under the current capitalist system and I don't see the majority of people supporting alternative systems.
Imagine if we deployed the people power and innovation that currently gets wasted in competition between rival social media applications and redirected it to doing something about climate change. It's not possible for individuals to make that change however because at the end of the day they need to pay their landlord (who I regard as largely parasitic leeches on productivity) and buy food at the shops; and the roles that would allow them to contribute to this don't exist in the number, or at the wages, required.
The cost of moving to zero emissions here in the UK was estimated as being £1 trillion so it was kind of kicked down the road to maybe slightly after 2050. Which is just mad. Sure China and India might be bigger emitters but someone has to make the first move. The innovations can then be shared for free with those countries, we can spend money to help them transition. This is our long term survival, we need to be less squeamish about taking what we need from "private property" (read tax havens, the stock market, etc). But clearly these changes aren't achievable at the speed and scale needed solely through voting. Democracies tend to limit themselves to a small range of acceptable views around a midpoint and take a long time to change even if there is a moral imperative, like the previous changes you mention; so I don't see how they can react at the speed necessary to fix this.
In addition addressing climate change without addressing social justice won't work. As the article mentions the people most affected by this are going to overwhelmingly be poor and in less-developed countries. They're going to need to come somewhere when their regions become uninhabitable and while it's possible our response is to erect barriers (see Europe, US, etc) or build prison camps from a moral standpoint it can't be.
I've gone through that stage too. Then I came out and decided I'm gonna do what I can, however little the impact might be. I am not hopeful or optimistic. I don't expect to succeed or fail. I am just gonna work on it.
Got a source? My share of that is 16 grand (1T/63M). Let's just bloody do it. My god. That's a biscuit, it really is.
'Cos if we don't do it we're dead. Infinite opportunity cost.
I've posted about this before, but thinking in terms of pictures of the queen's face here is really rather daft.
So > £1 trillion by 2050, not sure if that includes assumptions about cost reductions in renewables by then though so I'd assume compressing the timescale increases the estimate.
Either way it needs doing and it would seem that 2050 is going to be too late.
Recirculation, and doing it over a number of years, change the figure into something tractable of course.
But that just makes it an economics question - does the UK have £1Tn available, and over how long. I'm thinking probably no today, and yes between now and 2050 if they aren't stupid with the economy.
It just feels like people are suffering from a massive streetlight syndrome where they feel like the only valuable thing they can contribute with their skills (which includes the ability to control unprecedented computing power) is more inconsequential mobile apps.
It reaches an even more ridiculous point when you consider that Silicon Valley is considered "hubristic" by a lot of pundits. What?! No! Silicon Valley's ambitions are underwhelming at best. We should expect a lot more from it.
That's because the carbon-taxers are manipulative and playing on your emotions. You need to feel that it's an absolute dire situation that needs rectifying immediately. They believe the only way they'll get their way is shouting above everyone else.
Truth is, some of us are starting to feel 'I'll lite the world on fire myself before I capitulate to your infantile tactics.' You need to adjust your strategy to offer incentives to actual people that have actual problems, not blame and shout.
The kind of "solutions" that involve not changing any of the behaviours that are causing the problems are the ones that are not really solution.
> or they'll eventually be forced to
I think we overestimate most people's desire to do anything for the benefit of others. My fear is that a lot of the worst offenders of that are people who are quite likely operating on the basis they'll be dead before we feel the absolute effects.
As much as it's the only real solution, I don't think we can rely on regression to drive action. That's why the sugar for the pill of renewables will be eventual cheaper prices. We need to make the alternatives more appealing (or, at least some decent narrative to make them seem more appealing).
What if, for example, infinite disposable plastic bottles are actually the easiest solution, and the sustainable solutions are actually a bit more work (e.g. water fountains and bottles you carry around).
Yes, sure, perhaps we can fix landfill. Devil's advocate though - it is definitely not the case that every aspect of our current ecological nightmare has a win-win solution.
We _need_ to start pricing in externalities, whether people moan about it or not. Seriously - this is putting the seat belt on in a car level stuff. Deal with it.
Is the morning after a night out a regression? Not the hangover; the every-day life. No - it's absurd to paint it that way - the high life was the abnormality.
> We _need_ to start pricing in externalities
I might've been arguing the OP at crossed purposes, as my point seems compatible with yours, just framed differently at the point of delivery. We can't rely on the population to just decide "I'm going to do the right thing today". We make it a non-choice as you say. That can either be "it's cheaper/easier/better" or "you'll be locked up if not". It's quite a compelling narrative either way.
Just expecting large swathes of quite evidently moronic people (without delving too far into politics, if you agree the current political climate is as the result of ignorance, that's a sh*t-tonne of ignorant people out there - on the order of billions of people worldwide) to decide to look out for the interests of us as a collective is frankly wrong.
I agree with you - but I think we need to move past the "do it for the planet/species" argument as there's a lot of people who don't care and will be ridiculous in their stubbornness. The scale of it just doesn't work when trying to convince people. But show them how their heating bills will be cheaper and that they'll get a 6-month suspended if they throw a bottle in the sea, and things might change sooner.
I do bad things all the time because I have little agency.
I'm planning to make some major changes to move towards that, but still, if every store around me uses plastic in food etc I can't skip it.
We need to price in externalities. It's that simple. We need to cut this bullshit about the 'short-term economy' or phasing things out over 40 years or whatever; this isn't an emotional argument.
If we don't account for the cost of pollution we are going to kill ourselves.
Hmm, no it's not on the same level. Perhaps you can deal with it because you can afford to spend more on goods, but people in poverty will rightly moan.
Moaning does not change the outcome.
Again, we either reduce consumption, stop emitting (and likely have to capture) CO2, etc, or we kill ourselves.
It does not matter how much the child wails, if it is time to leave the arcade, one must go.
> can afford to spend more on goods
We must all use less. This is not a matter of bits of coloured paper; externalities must be priced in to force the market in the correct direction.
To take an example: if plastic bottles were banned worldwide tomorrow, or suddenly cost 10 USD per, this would have approximately zero effect on those in poverty other than shuffling some jobs around a bit.
> If plastic bottles were banned worldwide tomorrow
What happened to pricing in externalities?
It doesn't make a difference. We are not playing some identity politics game about who gets more or less.
I'm tired, sorry. But really. Just do it.
They will be poorer if you don't.
Pricing in the externalities doesn't mean we selectively jack the prices up on the "bad stuff" like plastic bottles (where you get to define what's bad). It means that the price of nearly everything goes up because the cost of raw materials, shipping, etc goes up since everyone on the supply chain has to pay for the pollution they're generating now.
These people often have kids, and they do a lot for them. They need to understand that it is all in vain if they don't do anything.
And yet, lots of those same people with kids are the reason we're in the current political climate. Deliberate choices designed to cause outweighted impact on the younger generations.
I don't want to veer too much off course here, but look at the demographics around the Brexit vote. Those are large swathes of parents across the country who've made a decision that they wont live to see the ramifications of, with those younger generations almost entirely voting in the opposite direction.
Personally, I believe it's because the issues at play are far too large to comprehend. We need to change the message, and it needs to be localised and individualised as much as possible. However, that's expensive, and the people with the money are the ones less likely to want to help get that message out there...
Disagree. Leave/remain is just as 50/50 among my generation (young people) in my area. Anecdotal to be sure.
[0] https://fullfact.org/europe/how-did-young-people-vote-brexit...
True, which is why we need a legislation framework to combat this problem. We need to do this together, as one human race (also helping certain other races who have it tough such as other mammals). Which won't happen when a country as important as the USA elects someone who "does not believe in climate change".
As per my other comments here - we need to do that 100%, but I don't believe that's a compelling way to get individuals to change their own behaviour.
"I don't have to do my bit as other people are much worse than me. Why aren't the other 6,999,999,999 other people doing their bit too?"
so you want to deceive people at scale to get them to do what you want? not sure I can get behind that.
Without want to slander my own profession, but: "marketing".
If your municipality doesn't respond to your transportation needs, your employer doesn't allow you to do remote-work, your professor insists on face-to-face meetings, how can changing your habits can reduce your carbon footprint?
We need to be more flexible in our ways and we shouldn't drive the society and the system this hard for so-called human and organization efficiency.
Why not?
And if it is let's continue and end it all because it's just plain sad. What a way to go !
Superficial customs have changed. Not how underlying perceptions of interests are governed.
Sure we can still understand thinkers of old in a limited capacity, but that's not due to us thinking like them or even experiencing the world like them as our experience is coloured by the concepts we use. We can understand them because of the continuity of society, the constant translation of the old into the new.
Capitalism can only exist now because of how much those underlying assumptions have changed.
Don't go by the dictionary definition of machiavellian. He really wasn't saying things that are hard to believe. He was really just pointing out the sorts of manifestations of human nature that surround us if we don't blind ourselves and refuse to see it.
As for Shakespeare, his plays still speak to fundamental, understandable human drama.
When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.
I don’t think it’s merely cultural continuation. We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.
Perhaps I missed something?
I dispute the very concept of "human nature", it implies a platonic "human", a base which we can only uncover the details of. While in reality there doesn't appear to be such a thing.
> I mentioned the authors as evidence that the stuff they taught about human nature still applies.
It kind of does, changes in the "public consciousness" are more often subversive than radical, a lot of concepts Shakespeare popularised or came up with are still in common use, however it's not because he's unlayering the onion of "the human" concept, but because these concepts are useful and haven't been subverted or forgotten.
> When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.
They of course still have practical value, when I say "in a limited capacity" I mean it in a more "glass-half full" way, a lot of context for these works has been lost forever and how a person reading a text understands a word relies more on his entire lifetime of experience than it does on the authors intent, good authors can generally bridge the gap easily, dead authors can't. So information is lost.
> We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.
Unless you've brushed up on your ancient Chinese that's not really true, the cultural continuity here is the translator.
Greed and lazyness are so innate that you could probably trace them back to lobsters.
Lobsters are a slave to their instincts, humans are not.
They are but just occasionally and briefly.
Let them carry on. Perhaps our exction will be exactly what saves the planet! Our archeological records will serve only as a warning for whatever "intelligent" life evolves in the future ;-)
It seems like a flippant attitude, but it seems to be the way many people are treating climate change (probably because the worst effects won't hit for decades, when many of the people responsible (i.e. voters) will be dead.)
We're leaving an unsustainable mess for our children, I'd like to see some action in their lawsuit:
https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/juliana-v-us
Since they are the ones that will be paying the full price of climate change.
We need big carrots and big sticks in order to achieve things like less flying - that means government regulation, huge material incentives for not flying/driving/etc.
Also, yeah, maybe it's too late now. If only one could reload from a savegame and learn from experience next time around.
Amazingly now a lot of the "Western world" would prefer those other human beings die rather than suffer a downgrade of their comfortable lives...
Of course, it would have been better to phase in the taxes decades ago since some solutions (mass transit, for example) can take a decade or more to build.
At the same time, you're right -- the 2 missing pieces are believing the threat is real, and thinking that you can get by if lots of other people change their behavior instead. Which they won't any more than you will, but that leads us back to human nature again.
So let's put self-regulation aside, you will never see it happen on a policy level because it won't be popular.
Same for emissions trading schemes, they're actually great things, but they aren't popular with the masses.
Anyway, let's drop The War on Terror and The war on Drugs and begin the War on Climate Change?
I'm not entirely saying I agree with people just flying around for the sake of it, but let's be honest, putting an end to most transport doesn't exactly seem like progress, let's also think of it this way, the problem is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, not traveling.
"companies still require employees to be on-site mostly for historical cultural reasons."
If you're a Doctor, truck driver, pilot, builder, fisherman etc, then how do you work remotely? The majority of the workforce can't just work remotely because knowledge workers can. Besides, data-centers also have a large environmental cost, remote work creates it's own mess.
I'm also a knowledge worker, but I just choose to live in the city close to my office and ride to work so I have a very small / no carboon footprint from transport.
I've also worked remote full-time, it wasn't for me, I think it has it's own set of issues.
We got used to it but it doesn't mean it's the way to go. We're acting like spoiled kids discovering that no, you can't have it all, all the time, for free.
- We have built our society around the assumption of mobility so it could be difficult to just switch overnight.
- Remote work doesn't work for many people and/or many situations.
- Opportunities are not evenly distributed across the country.
- Tolerance of alternative lifestyles is not evenly distributed.
- Access to hobbies, cultural institutions, etc. is not evenly distributed.
Driving cars is just an example, the other ones being flying less, procreating less, eating less meat.
The same is with cutting back on comfort of living. If I cut my comfort, but my neighbor don't and payoff is equal for us both, why should I suffer more than him? This is our basic species morality which we found even in apes [0].
[0] https://www.theemotionmachine.com/what-great-apes-teach-us-a...
Seriously? You mean Bill Gates works because otherwise he'd starve to death?
More seriously, I challenge you to hold a poll among your friends - given $x per month where x is enough to survive, would they stop working?
Everyone I speak to about this says that he/she personally would not, but the "other people" certainly will.
2. You and your friends are probably not like the average person.
3. You were probably raised with the idea that it's very important, both financially and socially, to have a job. It might be a lot harder to raise your kids with these values if they grow up in a world where working or not working has no financial impact.
A farmer might still plant, but decide to plant flowers instead of food. Or maybe they would plant exotic fruits instead of staple foods.
A programmer might still program, but they might decide to play with algorithm problems instead of developing medical software.
Not working means that you reclaim 50%+ of your awake time, and not any 50%, the 50% during which you spend most of your energy. I'm already living on ~70% of the min wage of my country, and I don't feel like I'm restraining myself at all so it wouldn't be such a big deal.
One might argue that this is all work.
We'll have to. It can either come from us, from policy, or from the laws of nature. Our choice.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature....
Another thing is that we're assuming that the current climate conditions on earth are becoming less optimal, which is unsupported. The current climate might actually be better. There are many examples, both negative but also positive, of the climate change.
If you were to change the sea level either way many cities would either be submerged or far from the sea they were close to since it's useful. If the precipitation patterns change the arable land distribution and ground/runoff water availability will change, the soils and landscapes are not adapted to that yet. Animal and plant behaviour will be different, but in many areas humans are dependent on them. Further out, if any of the atmospheric or ocean circulations change to a different pattern, it will change the local climates as well, with all and more of the above effects. To live in a fast-changing world is hard in itself too, it is unclear what to expect for the near and mid-future, making agricultural and infrastructure planning very hard.
So even if the end-state was preferable, the transition will be very painful, for us and the natural world.
> If you remove dotted predictions from your comic it suggests the temperature increase in the last 2000 years is about 0.3 - 0.4 Celsius degrees
I don't see where you get the 0.3 - 0.4 from. Looking at the last 2000 years on the XKCD graph, the temperature in year 16 is a bit under the reference, and the temperature in year 2016 is about 0.8 degrees above the reference. That's easily double your 0.3 - 0.4.
> This is pretty stable and is not matching past fluctuations, which are more accurately depicted here
I don't understand how you come to that conclusion. Both the XKCD graph and the graph you mention (the Wikimedia graph covering years 0 - 2016) show that 2016 temperatures are clearly higher than anything else we've seen the last 2000 years. Also note the arrow marked "2016" on the long-time Wikimedia graph indiciating the 2016 temperature, much higher than any other datapoint on the graph. The graphs simply don't support your conclusion.
> Another thing is that we're assuming that the current climate conditions on earth are becoming less optimal, which is unsupported. The current climate might actually be better. There are many examples, both negative but also positive, of the climate change.
There is scientific evidence for more severe tropical storms, rising sea levels (causing severe problems for the large fraction of the world's population living close to the sea), droughts, more severe weather (we're already seeing problematically hot heat waves). What are the positive effects that offset those negative ones?
The most actionable item (that is of course MUCH harder than not eating meat) is doing something to to convince the nations with most children per woman [2] to have less. But this is not easy - joining organizations that would educate women and doing volunteering or even dangerous work is insanely hard. Not buying meat, recycling and not riding your car seems hard for western people and so you FEEL like you are doing something, but you are not.
I will not have children but do 50 transatlantic flights this year, eat all the meat, hell, I'll even teach myself to drive a car just to show off how useless these individual actions are. You can't convince the world, stop CHANGING the world and change yourself, seek data and find the most actionable item. Jeez!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_action_on_climate_c... [2] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...
Why can't we live more sustainably and work on reducing global human population?
I think you are just signalling a different kind of virtue. You are scientific, sceptical and ever so smart. But you are not saving the world either.
We need fundamental cultural and policy change. The question is how to achieve it. Despite popular believe I don't think voting matters. Think about any significant societal change in the last century or so. Women suffrage, civil rights movement, anti-war movement, gay rights. None of these were initiated by the parliament. They all started as a popular rebellion and direct action.
So what are we to do.
- Change your lifestyle. Less flying, driving, meat.
- Divest fossil
- Get out of the techno bubble and get your hands dirty with direct action and civil disobedience. e.g. [1]
[1] https://rebellion.earth/