Foreign vacations (which aren't even occurring in 2020) are a pittance here...we're talking about billions of fossil-fuel powered engines, hundreds of millions of livestock, heating and cooling homes for upwards of 10 billion humans, the production of steel, fertilizer, plastics, concrete, electronics, mining operations, shipping, trucking...it's just so much more vast than the hypocrisy of rich leftist environmentalists going on vacations.
That's not the point here. The point is that climate activists ask their government for big changes because they fear civilization could end otherwise. And those big changes would have significant impact on the lifestyle of almost all people affected by these laws. So, why should one be willing to (and thus, vote for the changes) change ones lifestyle, if the advocates just say "well, I stop travelling abroad, when everyone else stops as well (and other carbon emission is reduced, too)"? The OP is about credibility, or, even lower level: sympathy.
Maybe it becomes more obvious if we look at one specific example. In the Netherlands they lowered maximum speed on highways to 100 km/h (from 120 km/h). Correct me if I'm wrong but the carbon saving from that law is close to non-existent compared to the whole economy's carbon emissions.
Or, the whole EU banned light bulbs. Also, the energy saving compared to the whole EU's energy consumption is probably sub 1%. And with the advent of white LEDs, people just use more light and the overall effect is even less.
Both measurments combined have an impact less than your claimed 5%-10%. Does that mean that government should stop taking small steps, and only the "big shot" counts?
Or can small steps (by governments OR individuals) be a tool to increase awareness?
But think broader, about concrete and steel and shipping, the really hard areas. There is no "choice" about steel, it's a technological and policy issue...Even if we cleaned up our individual consumer choices, that won't change the need for steel or change how it's produced in a dirty way.
Look at a wind turbine, for instance. It's a giant tower of steel. Even though we need wind turbines as fast as possible, we still need dirty steel to ramp those up, and we need new tech to then make future steel cleaner.
This is why focusing on individual choice is so small. Even if all us rich Westerners went vegan and rode bikes to work, that wouldn't address all the tricky technological and chemical issues.
Only if you offload moral culpability onto third parties that are acting on your behalf.
You'd probably say you aren't responsible for the climate change due to power companies that use coal instead of green energy. But I'd argue you are responsible for any non-essential energy use since you know they are going to burn coal to generate it.
If you turn on an air conditioner when your home is cooler than 95 degrees, that carbon usage is 100% on you.
Same goes for agriculture. If you stopped buying meat, they'd stop producing meat for you.
If your point is that the masses won't make those trade offs voluntarily, you are probably right. But the point of the article is that its entirely unconvincing to say society must reduce our standard of living by force when you won't do it voluntarily.
I think that "reducing standards of living by force" is an extremist position and it's unhelpful to even bring it up.
Switching electricity generation and transport towards renewables can have large impacts on CO2 emissions with very low impact on standards of living. Carbon taxes would raise some bills but the effect is much less than (for example) stopping air conditioning.
A carbon tax that doesn't raise cost much is not going to have much effect.
Though that depends on how you interpret "much." If you double energy cost, upper middle class folks won't change their thermostat, but work class folks won't be able to afford to turn on their AC.
Most plans I've seen that involve an energy tax involve moving that money back to the working class via reduced taxes or rebates.
We're already doing that. But it's not close to being enough. Emissions need to be halved by 2030 to keep to 1.5C warming: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-emissions/.... The recent economic shut-down from Covid-19 cut U.S. emissions by just 1/3 for one week in April: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/05/19/corona....
The point you're missing is that people who advocate for sweeping policy change - the sort that will require people to drastically change their lifestyles, as well as drastically changing the way human industry operates - are more likely to be taken seriously when they change their lifestyles in advance.
it would be a rude wake-up call for most if suddenly this stuff had to be produced responsibly, without planned obsolecense or presumption of free landfill storage.
however, this is exactly what needs to happen. and it needs to happen via regulation of the giant producers, because capitalism is not compatible with anything but maximizing profits and minimizing costs. individual action is mostly meaningless - if people had to personally kill the cattle they eat many would likely swear off meat. without direct involvement in the damaging process of production consumers are fsr too removed to stop consuming ethically-compromised, cheap goods.
It's not about actual role in climate change. It's about your image, as an activist, in a public eye.
Publuc eye is stupid. It's certainly guilty of logical errors you accuse it off – you're right about that. However, you will not be able to actually convince this public eye that he makes these mistakes, exactly because it's pretty dumb.
So, if you actually want to convince people en masse about something, you have to play by the rules of this PR game, even though you may very well understand that the rules are stupid and people make logical mistakes.
Poorer countries see richer countries say “no more fossil fuels” and could easily think “gee it’s convenient that you built the whole world economy around fossil fuels then try to stop their use just as we’re catching up.”
In the same way, in the US a lot of folks react to climate policy things with: “so rich folks will still be able to fly cross-country for 10x the price in an ‘eco plane’ but regular people will be cut off from that freedom.”
At the end of the day people are pretty much not willing to accept a quality of life cut voluntarily, especially not a significant one. Thus you see people say: okay so the oceans will rise, but I don’t live within an hour of the ocean so I’m fine. Yep, not willing to sacrifice my personal luxuries and freedoms for that. Folks should just move as the waters rise.
I think the far scarier issue is the second Order effects we can’t predict. But because we can’t predict it, the people who aren’t inclined to want to give up their quality of life (almost everyone), are even less likely to want to make preventative changes.
But there's also a different way to view this: This is a textbook tragedy of the commons situation. Basically we're stuck in regime where at the individual level, you're hurting yourself if you're doing the right thing, for almost zero gain to the environment. Getting out of that regime takes concerted action, which most likely will not happen without regulation. The most effective way to help solve the problem is therefore to push for that regulation. That's probably unless you're a celebrity or something.
If you ARE in fact hurting yourself too much, then you prove that people can chose one from the following:
A) keep the status quo, but the planet will most probably heat up and very bad things happen.
B) change the status quo to something that really, really hurts. But the reward for your surrender is that there is a chance that the planet does not heat up so much and less bad things happen a few decades from now.
That is what most people perceive in climate activists.
For example: If a really painful Carbon tax was introduced over night, the next day people's lives would look a lot different. Activities that used to be mundane would suddenly be expensive luxuries.
However, that's ignoring the fact that the economy would start to route around this tax. What are currently still niche low-carbon technologies will get a lot cheaper due to economies of scale. Photovoltaics are already a super cheap way of making electricity while the sun shines - suddenly there's going to be a huge incentive to building out storage.
(Of course, you wouldn't actually do that over night.)
But again, the OP is about credibility. So, for the advocates of legislation changes (e.g. climate activists) it would give their credibility a huge boost if they started to surrender symbolically from things like traveling abroad (and also, would remove a rhetorically very easy target from their critics).
The proposed legislation itself should of course refrain from being "just" symbolic.
With something like Rape, it is wrong and cannot be tolerated in even the smallest amount. Zero is the only acceptable level of rape.
Pollution is different. We all know that exterminating the majority of the human population and returning to a hunter/gatherer society is not an option. The realistic goal isn't to eliminate all forms of pollution everywhere, it is to reduce the pollution to a level that is less harmful to the planet. The problem is in identifying where and how deep to make the cuts.
Such a situation allows for a person to continue to eat meat, live in a big house and take vacations, while simultaneously calling for cuts to deforestation, legislating for EV transport and nuclear power, and do so without hypocrisy. Essentially you can have each group say "make the cuts, and make them deep, but make them over there".
But I think the article misses the point. In a classic Tragedy of the Commons problem, the participants don't need to abstain from feeding in the commons in order to organize a ban on it.
In fact, such self-abstainments are self-defeating because they cause the good actors to lose economic power and then have less ability to force systemic change.
I find that telling people to live with low CO2 footprints to be a whataboutism distraction to have them economically nerf themselves, hence silencing their economic power to force systemic change.
...now imagine that on a global international level. The ability to force change is correlated to economic power - which "good actor" countries are sacrificing, and "bad actor" countries are filling the void.
For these reasons, change can only happen with a global international accord that has an enforcement mechanism. ...and hence one of the reasons, I personally don't think Climate Change will be stopped.
I think that a better comparison would be "a still-active meth addict who advocates for government action that would likely deprive them of the ability to continue using meth."
In this scenario the addict actually has some 'skin in the game' as opposed to just preaching.
The same thing is true for climate change. When people who demand a war-time mobilization of the economy to combat climate change still emit gigatons going on foreign vacations, that signals to people one of two things. One, the reduction in standard of living required to address climate change must be enormous, because even those who believe catastrophe is at our doorstep won't suffer that reduction unless the government forces them to. Or two, those people don't really believe climate change will be that bad, and their demand for government intervention is a pretext for something else.