Individual purchasing habits are not the solution at scale. Why does our industry love systemic analysis of tech failure and systemic mitigation, but then blames the individually powerless masses on an individual level for our biggest problems. Your stance that individuals need to do their daily shopping better is just a way to make yourself feel good and to spread division amongst workers and the poor.

Since when did eating meat and flying concern only the working class and poor? How is collectively cutting back on carbon-intensive activities going to create these rifts?

Also, and more to the point, if these sectors have such a large carbon footprint, then where did that demand come from? I don’t buy that cutting back on animal products or flying aren’t scaleable. Our global culture isn’t inexorably evolving to flying helicopters to work and eating meat 4x a day with a tall glass of milk, so why aren’t we talking about behavior change more in the West? We’ve always had a choice, and we know better now that these choices and path dependencies are destructive.

Furthermore, companies that produce these products are simply providing for demand. It’s silly to lay the blame at their feet when they’ve no incentive to stop.

>Furthermore, companies that produce these products are simply providing for demand. It’s silly to lay the blame at their feet when they’ve no incentive to stop.

you're not thinking systemically enough - the incentive system is also a choice

there's a reason big oil were the original champions of plastics recycling as a marketable non-solution that focuses on individual/peer consumer habits over anything that would challenge their position. this neoliberal approach ultimately ensures their power remains.

these replies are saying to take the solutions available to us individually, but you're promoting individual actor conscientiousness over organizing to effect systemic change at scale. I'm not saying only corps/govs have the power to fix this, I'm saying that by taking an individualist consumer solution perspective, we let corps/govs off their leash because individuals can't stand up to their level of organized power.

I cede your point on plastics and powerful corporate organization. But waving a magic wand and regulating away oil and plastics (amongst others) is your solution? Don’t you think end-users have a role in this?

i think it's marginal at best and that "end-users" need to organize to make sweeping structural changes rather than only looking out for their own personal impact (or scolding their neighbors/family over it) as the powers that be would prefer us to. regulations are also not the only option and represent a narrow political perspective.

Individual purchasing habits are not the _only_ solution at scale. Individuals and the collective are in fact, not powerless.

While the whole “carbon footprint” thing was clever misdirection by the fossil fuel industry, there is still value in examining what aspects of your life are causing problems for the planet and trying to rectify them.

To say that the solutions to climate change are only large scale and available to massive corporations and governments is as foolish as to say that they are only small scale and available to individuals.

Whatever solutions are available to you, wherever you are in life, do the work to see them through. We need all the help we can get.

Do you imagine that you've done enough, and it's only those meat-eaters and plane-flyers who are causing problems?

Just living somewhere with heat and electricity and water, posting on here is adding to CO2 emissions, unless you're doing it from a 100% renewables-powered off-the-grid location. Even if you are, the messages you send onto the internet are routed by entities that consume fossil fuels.

Every building you enter, all the food you eat, every product you benefit from has been made with fossil fuels.

If you seek any goods or services in today's world, if you use any aspect of industrial civilization, you're contributing to the warming of the planet.

Of course, just by being alive everyone contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. But there’s a huge difference between somebody who flies 5 times a year and eats 10kg of beef a month, vs. someone who doesn’t do this (ceteris paribus). There’s a huge variance between individual contributions that matter in the sum.

And sure, a big part of emissions come from industry. But in the end, industries create products to be ultimately consumed by people. So, by changing our behavior we can also change industry. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also hold producers accountable and pressure our governments to set the right incentives. But just saying we as consumers don’t have any power to change anything is wrong.

I agree it would be good if people flew less and ate less meat, but have you checked whether those actions would be sufficient to meaningfully slow climate change, making it unnecessary to consider geoengineering?

I don't like the idea of pumping stuff in the atmosphere either. But we're not on track to control the climate right now, even if consumers do some nice things.

It's not just on the consumer, though. Policy makers need to get a grip. Yes, reducing meat, not flying, less heating, buying less crappy stuff, consume local food, etc. but we also need to allow people to move around in trains, put taxes on food imports, forbidding 2t SUVs, control birthrate, etc. We live in an extremely suboptimal society given our current constraints. All that can be enough for our population to live sustainably but that requires planning, not more time to procrastinate...

Most people, both in developed countries and across the world, rank climate at the bottom of their list of concerns. Some enlightened elites care about it, but they can only do so much.

That situation will remain exactly the same if we buy more time with geoengineering. But at least with geoengineering, hundreds of millions of people might not be driven from their homes by literally unlivable heat conditions in this century.

If those people want to live in your backyard, does geoengineering sound a little more appealing now?

> Most people, both in developed countries and across the world, rank climate at the bottom of their list of concerns.

My impression from the recent polls I've read about was that this is generally not true anymore, specially over here in western Europe after the summer we had.

> That situation will remain exactly the same if we buy more time with geoengineering. But at least with geoengineering, hundreds of millions of people might not be driven from their homes by literally unlivable heat conditions in this century.

This is just witchcraft. There's no way back from it and it's be a petty excuse to keep doing business as usual and generate profit. And keeping a stable climate isn't the only ecological challenge we're facing.

> If those people want to live in your backyard, does geoengineering sound a little more appealing now?

Absolutely not. And "those people" are already crossing the mediterranean ocean by thousands to live in my backyard.

I don't know who is making petty excuses or doing witchcraft. I make no profit from fossil fuels and I would rather see decarbonization at a much faster rate than we are doing today. The problem is, we are going to heat the Earth quite a bit at this point no matter what. Something has to be done about that as well as about the emissions that are making it worse.

This is not only about morality and profits. It is also about our actual Earth and what happens to it. It's still going to heat by several degrees even if humanity has the enlightenment that many people here seem to dream will happen soon.

> I make no profit from fossil fuels

We almost all profit from fossil fuel. Our entire lives are built around it and defined by it...

I don't really believe there will be an enlightenment, just a forced adaptation. And this will happen less quickly if we believe there is an easier solution than changing most of our ways.

We have countless examples of these. Did massively improved engines make car consume massively less petrol? No, they mostly got bigger. Improving farming? Just eat more meat and waste more food. Capable of building insanely dense but livable neighborhoods? We've never expanded our cities horizontally as much as now for cars and single family houses.

Getting a better control on the environment will just enable us to trash it more... just like usual.

How far do you go with that line of thinking? Was the Agricultural Revolution a mistake? Should we have remained hunter gatherers?

Aside from that, while I agree that people have historically often used technology to consume more, some of your examples seem at odds with facts, especially recent developments:

1. Fuel economy has been improving for the last few decades https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/20190930-sivak.html

2. Birth control has greatly reduced fertility rates. This suggests that your fellow humans may not simply be mindless maximizers of resource utilization, eager to exploit every technological advance to increase their consumption. They want sustainable lifestyle like you, and will choose it if it isn't too difficult to implement.

People want to live sustainably, but will struggle to adapt on a rapid timescale dictated by the planetary greenhouse effects. Giving more time will provide a better result.

Even if you are doing it from a renewable-powered off the grid location. Think of all the CO2 emitted to create those components and the logistics to get to that off grid location.

> If you seek any goods or services in today's world, if you use any aspect of industrial civilization, you're contributing to the warming of the planet.

That's not always true.

My neighbours are true eco warriors. They have planted literally hundreds of acres of trees and they live a carbon negative life. Granted, they are unusual, but it is not true that everyone is contributing. Just 99% of us.

Unless they're caring for those hundreds of acres of trees, a lot of them are probably dead.

Carbon accounting and the real world aren't quite the same, and the bias is always toward underestimating someone's CO2 footprint and overestimating the impact of mitigations.

What? I can see their property from mine and it's a rich forest thanks largely to their work. I don't understand where you are coming from.

That's great, but most people don't have hundreds of acres of empty land to plant trees on.