[avar]

You as a concerned citizen can do plenty on your own. Most people could cut down their emissions and other environmental impacts by 50% easily if they really cared.

The problem is that most people don't really care that much when push comes to shove, and in aggregate this is the reason for why we're moving so slowly on climate change.

[ajmurmann]

It's the tragedy of the commons though. If I stop driving my car and go vegan, we won't see any measurable difference in climate change. The only measurable thing that happens is my quality of life going down. If enough people do it and we actually get a benefit I could even see Republicans arguing for more deregulation and balancing out all the sacrifice we made. The only practical solution is collective action. In fact I'd argue that non action of countries should be the number one reason for sanctions and if necessary military force. Our entire future is at risk here.

[skywhopper]

There are limits to what individuals can do. Take automobile fuel efficiency. Cars these days are way more efficient and cleaner than they were fifty years ago, and they perform far better. Consumer choice would never have made this happen in response to market forces. You couldn't buy an efficient, high-performance car in the late 60s even if you wanted to. Companies needed an incentive to invest for the long-long term in technologies to improve the efficiency of their products. Short term price shocks weren't going to make that happen. Only multi-decade, ratcheting fuel-efficiency regulations that applied across the board and eliminated the risk to automakers for pursuing efficiency achieved our current state where we even _have_ the choice of buying cars that can achieve 50mpg or more with adequate performance.

[avar]

Yeah let's take fuel efficiency. If Americans all still drove cars with 60s fuel economy, but only drove as much per year as Germans do, they'd still (give or take) be emitting the same amount as they are now[2][3].

Now, why do they drive so much and drive such inefficient cars? It's largely because fuel is so much cheaper in the US than in the EU.

What I was trying to get at in my original comment is not that we should all solve climate change by personal action, and that public policy shouldn't be involved. I wish I could pay more taxes so the country I'm living in would migrate to renewables faster.

Rather, it's that if you look at how concerned people are politically about climate change, and then look at their revealed preferences, both when it comes to what they do personally and what they'd really stand for politically, it turns out that in the aggregate they don't take the problem seriously.

How many people who say "we must do something" in the US would say put up with a 100% increase in fuel taxes (bringing it in more in line with the EU)? I bet you'd go from 50% approval to 5% approval pretty fast.

1. http://internationalcomparisons.org/environment/transportati...

2. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheet...

[rabidrat]

And then there is Jevons' Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[akuji1993]

As positive as we should paint this, when somebody does this, it doesn't at all solve the problem. Corporations and Governments need to be kept at a level that stops climate change, to make a difference.

Citizens need a reeducation regarding meat, regarding travel, regarding transportation of goods and what the globalization does to the environment. The biggest change can only be triggered by either overthrowing the government or forcing them in some other way to start worrying about this.

[adrianhel]

We need artificial meat. Research and production should be funded by meat taxation.

We need environmentally friendly travel. Research and manufacturing should be funded by fossil fuel taxation.

These tasks should be implemented using the boiling frog principle. Increase taxes and funding by ~1.5% per year until we have met a goal of 50/50% meat/artificial meat consumption and 50/50% fossil fuel/renewable fuel. At which point the taxes and funding could be freezed until a 90/10 ratio is reached and then phased out by 1.5% each year.

It wouldn't shock anyone. You'd be "boiled" into a functioning world.

This should be sanctioned by UN.

[avar]

There shouldn't be any specific meat taxation, there should be a generic tax on carbon emissions, which would both the externalities of meat production, as well as other products.

If you just say tax meat by the kg you end up with stupid policies like discouraging UK customers from eating beef from New Zealand over domestic produce, even though importing it from abroad is more environmentally efficient (also counting for transport)[1].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15506220