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There were a study done in Sweden a few years ago that looked at the question about an individuals actions and the corresponding CO2 production.

No car > skipping flight > buy green energy > Get a electric car > diet.

https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/four-lifestyle-choi...




Of course the biggest emitters are industrial. Anything we attribute to individuals pales in comparison to the transport industry, production of goods like steel and concrete, resource extraction, power generation and production of consumer goods.

Telling consumers to cut back on X is essentially passing the back and making consumers feel bad without actually addressing the bulk of emissions.


Aren’t industrials working to sell things to individuals ?

You are the customer of the transports industry, you live in a concrete and steel building, you buy the devices made with extracted lithium or gold, power generators are running for every one of those … and for heating your house.

The problem is difficult because no one is responsible, but our entire civilization as such is responsible.

Yeah, we could probably make marketing people accountable for over consumerism. But they are just materialization of the ugly side of our civilization.


Show me where I have consumer choice about which transport company my goods are shipped on (as well as a shipping company that isn't a huge polluter), and I'll happily wield my influence.


There are many places where there are consumer choice (eg. electric cars, carbon offset credits for flights, renewable energy electricity providers, organic foods at the supermarket[1]), and the uptake there is tepid at best. The critical mass of demand is just not there.

[1] I'm not saying that organic food helps climate, but it captures a similar idea. People complain that industrial food production is bad because of pesticides/hormones, organic mostly solves these problems, but people strangely aren't taking up on it.


The problem with Organic food is the same with carbon emissions; the cost of is generally too high compared to the perceived individual benefits of the organic/low-emissions alternative.


Dunno, as someone who cares deeply about food (and really enjoys it) organic, if nothing else, tastes better (usually). Especially if it's local, small-production organic. Plus has organic pesticides (or no pesticides) so it's probably healthier.


In my experiece organic doesn't taste better for most things because the varietals are the same. Alternative varietals of fruits and veggies tend to be organic, and of course those often taste better or have more complex flavor, but its not because they are organic.


It's actually better with organic food, because you can benefit yourself by not ingesting pesticides/hormones/whatever, whereas with carbon emissions the most you'll achieve is save the earth from 0.00000001 degrees of warming.


My point is not that your personal benefit isn't potentially good with organic, but like reducing carbon emissions, there is a deferred, nebulous benefit to consuming organic which is hard to value against the immediate increased cost.


>Telling consumers to cut back on X is essentially passing the back and making consumers feel bad without actually addressing the bulk of emissions.

That's not quite true. Individual action leads to societal change. Climate change will never be treated as an emergency until we believe that it is, and until it makes us change our individual behavior to show that it is. The other problem is that this behavior change needs to start at the top. We need to see that our elected leaders are treating this like an emergency. Unfortunately that will never happen because of a certain political party in the US that ignores science and delights in human misery.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/carbon-footprint-climat...

  Psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley tested this exact scenario in a now-classic study. Participants filled out a survey in a quiet room, which suddenly began to fill with smoke (from a vent set up by the experimenters). When alone, participants left the room and reported the apparent fire. But in the presence of others who ignored the smoke, participants carried on as though nothing were wrong.


Yes, but those things do not exist in a vacuum, they are produced based on demand. If we care so much about our own convenience that we are unwilling to change the things we can on an individual level, how will we ever be willing to sacrifice things as a society? Are you going to give up your 2-day prime delivery because we no longer ship things by truck? Or a wide variety of items at your grocery because we stop gathering food from the four corners of the earth?


Come on, it's not that GP, or me, or you willed 2-day prime delivery into existence. It's something Amazon, and other companies, offer. It can be "given up" by everyone, without any objection, by said companies deciding not to offer it anymore. People will grumble and adapt, because they can't really do much about it.

The leverage over this, and all other conveniences, rests squarely with the companies offering them. People choose out of what's available on the market, not from the space of possible offerings.


Sure, Amazon could stop offering it, and that may be a good thing. However people are not used to the convenience and will stop using them and use Walmart's two day shipping. Or just drive to the store themselves, which is likely even worse for emissions.

Although I am not certain it would be a good thing. It is my understanding that delivery services like USPS, UPS, Amazon, etc. are better for emissions than making little trips to the store. Its dozens or hundreds of deliveries aggregated into a single highly optimized trip that keeps many other people off the road. If you give people the convenience of having it within a day or two, it may actually save entire round trips to the store. Without it, I think you have more cars on the road with more emissions.

There could be some good in more incentives around Amazon Day deliveries. Where all your goods show up on the same day each week. Reduced packaging and potentially reduced emissions. It would actually be cool of they did something and produced routes, where each neighborhood gets the same day, rather than individuals get to pick and change their own. That might make some decent impact. But you still have to convince people to wait a week.

Although that is not getting into the consumerism that Amazon fuels, and the extra plastics and trash that are produced because of it. Which are bad. But that I don't think you can put that entirely on Amazon, that's a society problem.


Fair enough. Delivery services are perhaps not the best topic to talk about in this context - there's a strong argument for them being net better for climate than brick&mortar shops, particularly in car-centric cultures.

My comment was less about the particulars of 2-day delivery, and more about the general problem of punting the responsibility to consumers for things they're structurally unable to affect. The concept of "voting with your wallet" is one of the biggest modern-day scams.


And Amazon will stop offering it if people stop using it. It seems to me that people are using this argument to put all the blame on corporations and big industry while ignoring that their own actions are the reason such entities exist in the first place.


You can tell every consumer to check every purchase they make, and put an enormous burden on them which will not happen. Or you can legislate companies and actually get it done.

That's the point of legislation: when the free market doesn't solve something, you add rules and enforce them. That's why food products must be edible and you wouldn't ask consumers to research and pick the right ones.


> Or you can legislate companies and actually get it done.

Politicians write legislation, and are elected by the people. If the people are unwilling to sacrifice any amount of their comfort then they won't elect politicians who will make them. And let's not kid ourselves, forcing industry to be more green will come at a cost to everyone: things will be more expensive, less readily available, and possibly of lower quality.


but if Amazon did that, a competitor would start to offer it and soon replace Amazon as the Status Quo.

Amazon knows this, and thus won't stop offering it. Consumer Responsibility isn't the whole picture, but it is part of it.

Pollution-based taxes is the only realistic solution to the problem IMO, but they seem far away from being implemented anywhere.


Even last mile delivery isn't that polluting... We're talking things like steel and concrete production, massive ocean container ships, coal plants, the extraction of every type of ressource, etc...

Again, the things you mention are putting the onus on the consumer and are relatively small.

Everything consumers and non-industrial businesses do accounts for only 13% of global emissions. The entire global agriculture system accounts for only 10% of emissions and of that, 80% occurs during the production stage.

By contrast, concrete alone is 8% of global emissions. Forestry is 10%. Steel production alone is 9% of all emissions. Simply producing these base products creates more emissions than absolutely everything consumers do. Energy production is 25% and of that, industrial producers use most of it.


> Even last mile delivery isn't that polluting... We're talking things like steel and concrete production

Right, but reducing consumption has knock-on effects across the board. Less need for ocean shipping when we demand fewer non-local goods, less need for concrete and steel when we build less stuff with it, etc.

> Everything consumers and non-industrial businesses do accounts for only 13% of global emissions.

Until you account for how many industries would exist if there were no consumers for their products. This whole argument stinks of trying to push the blame away from ourselves, just like the corporations are doing. We are all responsible for this, but we're all too self-centered to ever do anything about it because our comfort is much more important to us than the future of the world.


> massive ocean container ships, coal plants, the extraction of every type of ressource

but all these things... serve consumers. Container chips contain goods that people buy, that required resource extraction and transport.


That steel and concrete builds new buildings, it doesn't get sent down to the dump to rot. This is a common refrain I hear against individual action, but those industrial emitters aren't doing it because they love how CO2 smells. They are producing consumer goods or in a supply chain to produce consumer goods.


>Of course the biggest emitters are industrial.

Can industry exists without consumers? If you don't buy any cars then you have an impact. If you don't buy a new laptop/phone each year you have an impact on electronic industry. If you don't order online a 1$ gadget daily you have an effect.


Your individual effect is a rounding error. It's not even measured. Meanwhile, the fact that everyone else buys new laptops/phones/cars/gadgets makes it hard for everyone to individually forgo these things.

On the other side of the table, the choices made by the industrial players have immediate, large scale impact. A single board can decide to shut off some of the operations - stop making a gadget, stop making 100 different models of the same thing to try and segment the market, etc. - and, while they will have to convince dozens of other influential people to approve, if they succeed, the effect will be immediate and greater than a million consumers voluntarily changing their purchasing patterns.


> Your individual effect is a rounding error. It's not even measured. Meanwhile, the fact that everyone else buys new laptops/phones/cars/gadgets makes it hard for everyone to individually forgo these things.

No raindrop is responsible for the flood eh? This is why the problem will never be dealt with.


> No raindrop is responsible for the flood eh?

Indeed. Have you ever seen meteorologists appealing to raindrops? Have you ever seen a hydrologist counting water in fraction of CCs? A flood management system where individual droplets mattered?

No, a flood is a bulk event. It's managed like a system, using means with leverage over whole flows. Measurement starts with cubic meters. Nobody gives a damn about single raindrops, they're immaterial.

Same applies here. Focusing on regular individuals, and trying to get them to change their life style one by one, against the gradient of economic incentives controlling all of our lives, is like trying to pluck individual raindrops from rushing flood water. It's insane to even try. The answer is in redirecting the water stream; the droplets sort themselves out.

> This is why the problem will never be dealt with.

No, the problem will never be dealt with for as long as we focus on attempts to brow-beat everyone into self-sacrifice - to which people naturally react by ignoring the beating and resenting the beaters.


I am not demanding you to "self sacrifice" in the sense I don't think you should stay in the dark to use less electricity but more on turn off the lights you don't need.

Similar, don't buy shit you don't need, do a bit of effort to research if maybe you can "sacrifice" a bit of money to buy a greener product or that will be shipped from a closer location etc. The industry is burning fuel to give you the shit you want, for you whims , you can't just blame them.


> No, the problem will never be dealt with for as long as we focus on attempts to brow-beat everyone into self-sacrifice - to which people naturally react by ignoring the beating and resenting the beaters.

And if people are unwilling to make sacrifices, and people elect their government, then who will make the changes?


>Your individual effect is a rounding error.

Correct, but now imagine you have a large number of individuals not only 1 .

Have you seen just this last week the Blizard/Activision responding to just individual action??? If just a random dude would have protested they would have done nothing, but when "influencers" and communities got involved shit happened, those bastards lost money and they had to do something.


https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T02.01#/?f...

Industrial is the largest energy consumer by sector, but doesn't pale in comparison to transportation, commercial and residential. If anything C19 has brought residential up to industrial levels.


Yes, and this needs to be the top comment, and should be in every article about climate change.


That one for Sweden. In countries that neglected it in building codes, before buying green energy there's an "greenify your home" bit. Mostly heat insulation and removal of fossil fueled heating.


Also note that some of them are easy and you can simply do them today. Buying green energy might not be as good as ditching your car altogether, but it's a lot easier so you might as well start with the quick wins.

And the category of buying shiny new stuff is missing. It's a big part of consumer-influencable emissions, though it's admittedly even harder to make a significant impact on than ditching cars after you bought your essentials second-hand (where possible/reasonable of course). Pushing for products to be produced in a climate-neutral fashion (voting with your wallet) would definitely be something though.

Edit: wait, Sweden. How is space heating not on that list? Surely where the majority of the Swedes live is not too cold for heat pumps with perhaps a bit of aid from pure electrical heat creation for a few days per year, is it?


The highest bar in the chart says "have one fewer child". It actually exceeds any others by extremely large margin [0]. How is that even considered as the option? One child less means halving population after every generation. Eliminate the population and problem solved?

[0] https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/drimage/1120/630/4832/fourc...


> One child less means halving population after every generation

I really don't see the problem here? It's not like having a large population is in itself a noble goal that makes life better for people.


All of our economics relies on having new people. Pensioners, ie people who cannot produce anymore, are effectively upkept by the younger generations, in exchange for their savings.

We don’t know how to run economies without young people. Look at the demographic issues in Japan, and lesser extent now in China.


They appear to be suggesting exactly that, if you read the asterisk:

"Cumulative emissions from descendants, decreases substantially if national emissions decrease."

So doing all the other ones actually lowers that one.

And even then it only makes sense if no-one else has more kids to compensate, so it's a personal action that will cut your personal carbon, but like most things in this area not something that works unless we all do it (globally)


> Eliminate the population and problem solved?

Why would we have to reduce the population below a number which is sustainable? Nobody is advocating that.

The actual number could be fine tuned through tax breaks. Give childless couples an X% tax break. Single child families a Y% tax break. 2 child families no tax break. 3 child families a tax penalty. 4 child families a larger penalty.


One child less means halving population after every generation.

Only if you assume the average is two children per couple and a replacement reproduction rate, which doesn't fit the reality I know. We have a huge population in the billions precisely because that's not what is going on.

If we drop to something below exponential growth rates, this is not a tragedy.


Massive population reduction (I don't think any serious person is suggesting elimination) would be the single most effective advancement we can make in reducing our environmental problems. It's definitely a tough sell for politicians, and environmentalists seem dismissive of it -- which makes me doubtful of their policy prescriptions. If population reduction isn't on the table of things to achieve, then the other arguments are lost on me. Nothing is sustainable when scaled up to an ever increasing population size.


It's true tho. On a world with limited resources and limits to the amount of pollution our planet can deal with, less people means a longer runway.


One fewer doesn't mean 2 -> 1 necessarily, does it? There's no sustainable way to maintain a greater-than-replacement birth rate long term (excepting self-supporting space colonies or something).


You can't fault the logic, fewer people means less demand for the things that create the carbon emissions in the first place.


> Get a electric car Chart says "Switch eletric car to car free". Text says car free is 2.4 tonnes a year, diet 0.8 a year.


How could you leave out the one with the biggest impact, which is basically "less humans"?


That's not actionable advice on a timescale that will affect co2 emissions any time soon. Are you suggesting we kill people to reduce the population?


> That's not actionable advice on a timescale that will affect co2 emissions any time soon. Are you suggesting we kill people to reduce the population?

Your second sentence is an overreach. The natural death rate in the United States is about 0.9% of the population. [1]

[1]. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...


Okay, so how many years would it take to halve the world population through natural death rate, and how do you stop all people on earth from having children without a world war?


> Okay, so how many years would it take to halve the world population through natural death rate

If the natural death rate is 0.9%, the population would decline by about 9% each decade.

The drop doesn’t have to go to 50% - just down to whatever the sustainable limit is.

> how do you stop all people on earth from having children without a world war?

I’m not sure that even a world war would achieve that. And again, it’s not necessary or desirable to go to that extreme. If the goal is sustainability, we just need to rightsize the population for sustainability. The actual population depends on the prevailing per capita emissions from whatever energy technologies we are using at any given time. The more carbon neutral the technology, the higher the population can be sustained, at least with respect to greenhouse gases.

To reduce the birth rate, rather than force everyone to stop, we could just reward those who are willing with tax breaks. X% tax break for zero children. Y% tax break for 1 child. 0% tax break for 2 children. And extra taxes for >2 children.


Just like the idiots vote in a moron, and they kill themselves.


Because most of the developed world (if not whole) is already there. How do you plan to implement it in less-develop states?


No, even not having children has lower impact than not doing these things. Especially that environmental costs of them ramp up slowly.

Humans tend to be on their own barring social pressures carbon neutral. The biggest expenses being food and water, if these aforementioned practices are applied. It gets even better if these young can work to reduce the impact of the warming.

We'll need a lot of manpower to pull off the necessary changes. Just due to the scale of it. Well educated people too. We're on at least one to two generations of lag in education related to physics, chemistry, agriculture, material science, civil engineering, process engineering, general ecology, social engineering... And the old will start to wear down and think in old patterns.

Additionally further down the list is "live together in higher density" and "buy locally made things" bits.


I have a hard time believing that "humans tend to be on their own barring social pressures carbon neutral." Can you find some of these carbon neutral humans in first-world countries to show me, as an example? Or when you say "barring social pressures", do you just mean "if you don't count this whole society thing"?


And what’s your solution to this? And has any study said explicitly the number of humans is the main problem? Or their actions and consumption that’s the problem?


pretty hard to influence for individuals


*fewer


I wonder how much energy we waste on pedantry.


Probably not as much as we waste on resolving confusion caused by playing fast and loose with shared rules/understanding of things.


Sometimes it has its place. Can you imagine a public speaker making errors like this? I think it detracts from the message. Public, and especially popularly read stuff should be as correct as humanely possible. Good grammar is a habit, improved by repeat exposure.


I appreciate this, I want my snappy sentences to be grammatically correct.


Some would disagree with this on the moral point that its basically a call for genocide, whether that is intentional or not is hard to tell.

I'd disagree on the facts though. There's already such a wild difference in carbon intensity between two humans, that it would be ridiculous to suggest that the first step would be to remove humans rather than the activities that make that difference (and are sometimes wasteful, inefficient or counterproductive)


How does this differ if the majority of your electricity is zero carbon?

Coal electricity is 60% of emissions. Aviation is less than 5%. How is skipping a flight that highly ranked of you are burning a ton of carbon just being at home (if you have coal fired power).

Actual rankings have to be energy mix dependent.


Because that 60% from coal is more or less shared across everyone, but flights are, on the global scale, a luxury item. In many cases, taking a transatlantic flight emits more CO2 equivalent than your average person commuting for a year.

So even though aviation is a small part of it all, it is one of the individual actions able to have outsized impact, usually for leisure or at least often for non-essential reasons.


That's quite false.

I live in Southwestern Ohio and get probably 75% of my power from coal. My pot of coffee emits far more CO2 than someone in Portland, who gets 0% from coal and most of their power from hydro. It's the same pot of coffee. Our cost of energy is similar and our standard of living is similar.

Where you get your power greatly affects how much CO2 you emit doing the exact same things. All energy is not created equal.

There are two huge barriers to doing anything about this problem. The first is denialists and those with vested interests in fossil fuels promoting denialism. The second is well-intentioned people who understand that there is a problem over-complicating the issue, promoting misunderstandings, or promoting the idea that this can't be solved without massive decreases in standard of living.

The latter, which I term "abstinence based environmentalism" by analogy with abstinence-based sex ed, will work about as well as politely telling teenagers not to have sex. If you tell people they need to become poorer to save the planet, they'll ignore you... especially if they are already poorer than you in which case you look like a hypocrite.

This problem is actually pretty simple. The following steps won't solve it 100% but they'll go pretty far.

(1) Phase out coal for electricity generation in favor of... almost anything else except maybe oil shale.

(2) Push electric vehicles, not because all EVs categorically emit less carbon than gasoline cars but because it's a hell of a lot easier to replace a few point source power plants than it is to replace a vast fleet of millions of internal combustion engines. (That and your typical EV is indeed better... even if your electricity is 100% coal an EV is generally no worse than an ICE car due to the superior efficiency of large power plants and the high embodied energy of gasoline.)

(3) Continue to subsidize renewable energy and grid-scale storage.

(4) At least stop shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants before renewables are in place to replace them, and at best put some serious funding behind next-generation nuclear efforts. Fusion is also grossly under-funded. Ignore the "it'll always be N years away" idiots. There has been substantial progress even with very limited funding available.

There is no point in quibbling about small contributors like aviation (<5%) while we are still burning shitloads of coal and coal is far easier to replace than jet fuel. You don't solve a problem like this by making the solution maximally inconvenient.


I'm aware of this. I'm living in a place where power is over 99% renewable and makes use of no gas for utilities, work from home and drive fewer than 5,000km/y as a household, and eat a low-meat diet.

The biggest gains to be had are obviously systemic, and what I do as a consumer is far more limited in its scope and impact. I still limit my flights, no longer attend in-person conferences, try to travel more local, because what else am I going to do? I'm aware this is like putting out a cigarette when the whole town's already on fire, but I can't deal with the dissonance otherwise. It's still an individual luxury that can have an oversized impact compared to everything else I do.

Advocating for it is not going to be sufficient at all, but it's still the most impact I can have when all the big stakeholders who have to fix their powergrid are not even in countries I live in.


  > It's still an individual luxury that can have an oversized impact compared to everything else I do.
as an individual, isnt that plane going to fly wether im on it or not...?

ive ridden on many long intercontinental flights where a huge amount (almost half) of seats were unfilled..


The unit of capital allocation in airlines is one plane, and cancelling a flight or adding a new one probably requires some advance notice to airports and other agencies not to mention time for maintenance, flight crews, etc. to ready it or take it out of operation. Then there's pilots' unions etc.

So no, your decision does not immediately affect the number of planes flying, but if many people fly less the net effect will be fewer planes in the air after some time delay.




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