Here are some ideas:
- You say you're happy with "in the low 60s F in the winter", but what if you had no heat? I don't know where you live, but where I live this would be untenable. Because of abundant energy, I can live in a place that is in the 0s through 40s pretty often, without having any wood-burning heat source in my house, or spending a large amount of my time cutting and splitting wood. Not to mention how much deforestation it would require if we didn't have abundant oil (which is much better to refine from petroleum than whales, btw), gas, or electricity.
- You say you're happy without driving "frequently". But what about driving at all? The pre-gasoline solution to getting individual people to individual places was literally horses. Bicycles actually work pretty well now for this, but only because of all the roads that have now been built everywhere to support cars.
- Speaking of that, are roads and sidewalks a total luxury, or are they more important than that? Concrete is another critical component of our modern infrastructure that is downstream of sucking super old dead stuff out of the ground.
There is so much more of this sort of thing: grocery stores, modern medicine, illumination when the sun isn't up, it goes on and on. It is not hyperbole to say that human civilization at anything approaching the current scale and standard of living has been achieved on the back of abundant energy from fossil fuels.
It would not be impossible to roll this all way back, but it would be impossible to do so without devastating impacts to people currently living.
I strongly believe that rather than retreat, the far more promising path is to advance. As abundant as energy from fossil fuels has proved to be, they don't hold a candle to the energy that exists in nature: the sun sends us an astronomical amount of energy each day, the earth is mostly made out of rock that is hotter than industrial kilns, the bonds of particles within atoms themselves contain a huge amount of energy. The challenge is that these forms of energy are much harder to extract than lighting hydrocarbons on fire.
The trick is to make sure we use enough the abundant and easily accessible energy we have today as an investment in our collective project to lever up our ability to tap into the even more abundant but difficult to use energy that is laying all around us.
these companies emitted carbon to satisfy the demands for goods/services from various populations around the world. By pinning the emissions onto the companies like this as responsible, it is indirectly implying that the end consumer has no responsibility. Which is absolutely not true.
The way, i think, to fix it is to price carbon emissions properly. This requires _all_ countries in the world to participate and enforce.
I’m not saying bad actors haven’t acted badly - demand generation is pretty evil, and we should definitely curtail that - but the problem is ultimately not the man in the boardroom or the White House or the luxury yacht. It’s the man in the mirror.
it's actually around a million times. a single air trip alone (let alone a private jet) emits far more carbon than an average family, and the ultra-wealthy fly a lot. plus the rest of their emissions too, of course.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi...
as the twitter classic goes: "the guy with only an Xbox one and a mattress in his room probably has the lowest carbon footprint but no one wants to talk about that". and yeah, that's dead right, the billionaire is probably into the billions of times multiplier over that guy.
that's why it's silly to whammy on consumer electronics etc as supposedly being some horrible social sin - people are going to want to do things, and actually things that keep you in your house and not traveling via car or (especially!) air travel do drastically reduce emissions overall. Even buying a new PC every year is peanuts compared to your spring break in florida.
My power went out for and hours-long stretch recently, and it only highlighted how much richer my life is because our society figured out how to provide everyone energy at very low cost.
The question now is whether we can keep doing so, while diminishing the externalities to a sustainable level. I think we can!
The next question is how to do it. There is no one simple trick that's gonna do it. In my view, figuring this out is the work of our era. In other eras, people have figured out how to make enough food to feed everyone, how to move people around quickly, how to communicate across great distances near-instantaneously, and all sorts of other things. I think this is ours. That's scary but it's also exciting. We can be heroes!
If the price for (say) carbon had been properly baked into the cost of gasoline, there would have been significantly less fat to skim off the top and we'd have vastly fewer resources and energy billionaires.
That is: yes, it's great that cheap energy has lifted billions out of poverty and afforded them the lifestyle they have today. But now those billions are going to be the ones that have to pick up the tab while also being the most exposed to the dangers.