[konschubert]

Using a re-usable cup in the face of climate change is like passing by a burning house, spitting into the fire and feeling good for having helped.

We need political action and economic incentives. Individuals changing their lifestyle isn’t going to accomplish anything.

[zapita]

Political action, economic incentives and individual lifestyles are all inter-dependent. We need to acknowledge that at this point, no single action can save us.

So using reusable cups may not on its own solve global heating... But neither will any single election, tax or international agreement.

Instead of telling each other “what you’re doing is not solving everything therefore it’s useless”, we should be saying “what you’re doing is a good first step, and here are other ideas for doing more”.

[konschubert]

I am worried that people switch to re-usable cups and say: "Well, I've done my part, I'm good."

[zapita]

Yes, I worry about that too. But I also worry about the opposite: reinforcing the cynical idea that it’s all pointless anyway, so why bother doing anything.

The way I see it, someone who makes the effort to switch to reusable cups is very likely willing to make another effort. They might just need you to point you in the right direction. For example, the issue of why we make so many non-reusable cups in the first place, where they come from, who has the power to stop them but doesn’t, and how they can be held accountable. Just a suggestion of course! :-)

[ForHackernews]

What if it is all pointless and humanity is just f$%ked? That's a very real possibility at this point. The best scientific evidence suggests that we might still have a chance to avoid the worst-of-the-worst of climate change, but changes keep occurring sooner than predicted and that already slim chance is slipping away as we speak.

What is the ethical way to live staring an unavoidable catastrophe in the face? When can we honestly give up?

[zapita]

Personally I think we should never give up. We are not in a video game with a binary outcome - win or lose. There’s a wide spectrum of possible outcomes, and some involve less suffering than other. I think it’s our responsibility to keep going, and push towards less suffering. If only to make the most of the time we have.

[konschubert]

I appreciate your point of view and your arguments are good.

[bamboozled]

You're absolutely right that in the scheme of it all the impact may be small but there is climate change and there is also a huge problem of waste which needs addressing.

I agree that a single individuals actions will have minimal impact, but isn't it the individual that makes up the whole?

"Individuals changing their lifestyle isn’t going to accomplish anything."

Why do you say that?

Does any evidence exist that individuals making changes doesn't do anything?

For example, my partner and I no longer own cars, that's hopefully two whole cars off the road for practically a lifetime. Does this have zero impact ?

Also think of it this way, imagine if all of the people in the world right now who couldn't afford to fly, own cars and consume as much as you, could afford to do so and proceeded to do so without thinking about the consequences, it would be 2050 pretty quickly.

I agree legislation and emissions trading schemes etc are important but i don't see it happening fast enough just yet. So why not take some ownership of your own and do your best in the meantime ?

[hjek]

Thanks for not driving.

An obvious observation: Individual change and collective change are not mutually exclusive, so I think the choice between them is a bit of a false dilemma.

To pick an extreme example: Me not stabbing anyone is not enough to end knife crime in general, but this individual action (of not stabbing anyone) can still be considered an ethical baseline, so it's still good for me to not do that. Similarly, you aren't going to stop climate collapse by not driving, but...

[konschubert]

> For example, my partner and I no longer own cars, that's hopefully two whole cars off the road for practically a lifetime. Does this have zero impact ?

The impact is that you inspire others, which makes political change possible in the long run.

But beyond that... as long as oil is coming out of the wells, and it's legal to burn it, somebody will do it.

[javagram]

In fact by not burning the oil yourself, you reduce the demand for oil which can depress the price, causing others to use more oil since gas prices are lower!

[dTal]

Are there good reasons to think that the rate at which oil is extracted and burned is independent of consumer demand? It's not far-fetched, but it would be surprising.

[konschubert]

The rate might be affected by consumer demand.

But I think that the total amount of oil that will be burnt only depends on the price of extracting the next barrel vs the price of other energy sources.

[wazoox]

The French High Council for Climate published its first report last week. It says that if everyone were doing "heroic" efforts: ditching cars for public transport and biking, never ever flying, going vegetarian, heat less their homes (and no A/C), then emissions would go down only 25 to 40% at most; this is significant, but they must drop much more than that.

Therefore strong, decisive political action is mandatory. Individual actions, personal incentives can't be enough: we need an effort similar to what Great-Britain did when it entered "war economy".

[edejong]

What would happen if we would publish each individual estimated CO_2 emissions of the past year? You'd be obliged to place it under your emails, on your Facebook and LinkedIn account and it'll be placed squarely on your WhatsApp photos. No way to hide it.

Published CO_2 emissions would include an estimation of the total CO_2 emissions estimates of the complete production flow of each product you buy, the distance you travel for work and all other energy consumption.

Would that incentivize people?

(for the purpose of this argument, assume we can actually make such an estimate)

[NeedMoreTea]

I'd be delighted if that were to happen, impractical though it might be. Only if every product and company had to do the same, including all their externalities. That would both incentivise and enable people to shop and invest wisely. Colour code and grade them just like EU energy efficiency labels - which were so successful in pushing to higher efficiency they had to re-rate them all.

Right now it's almost impossible to know the impact of what you buy, or which is better. Or how the impact of some produce available year round varies across the year. I know buying a lettuce in winter is going to have larger impact than in summer, but I have no way to quantify it.

It would also be an excellent starting point for building a carbon tax, that could slowly escalate to punitive.

[edejong]

There is complete accounting in the food chain. It is precisely known where your lettuce was grown, when and how it was transported, stored, frozen, thawed and placed in the supermarket. It is even known who's picking it up from the shelves and paying for it.

The only problem is: the general public knows nothing of this!

[NeedMoreTea]

I'm sure that's the case in most industries. They know what they buy, sell, who they outsource to etc. Lenovo and Apple know where their laptops were made, which bits and what raw materials or suppliers they used.

All we need is to derive the impact from each step, and some helpful way to present it. For presentation we know approaches that work. So it's really just requiring the carbon/impact accounting - and penalties for fraud. :)

Then we can decide if we're better off, environmentally, buying a Thinkpad, a Macbook, or a Mac Mini with LG monitor. Whether to pass on those out of season lettuces, or should really be concerned about something making more impact. All we can do right now is guess for just about everything.

[AlchemistCamp]

That would be brutal to people who write widely-used Electron apps.

[Filligree]

Good.

[bsder]

> Would that incentivize people?

No, because, much like the "water crisis" in California, individuals didn't make the direct choices the led to the crisis. Shipping your food from half a world away was not a direct choice any consumer made. Making your clothing half a world away was not a direct choice any consumer made. Building all infrastructure around cars was not a direct choice any consumer made.

If you want to reduce CO2, you have to do something to bake it's price into wherever it is being used or created.

(The "water crisis" in California is actually an "agribusiness water crisis"--if every individual in California quit using water for drinking, showers, lawn watering, swimming pools, etc., the Central Valley agribusinesses would still be unable to irrigate without pumping out the aquifers. The only solution to the California "water crisis" is to shut down the agribusinesses and make them move to somewhere with water. We are actually seeing this with desalinization in California--desalinization can actually supply almost all the people but isn't going to do anything for businesses.)

[edejong]

Short answer, because I really have to get some sleep.

You assume people are incentivized by price, but people are incentivized by status. That's why they buy fake Rolexes and put themselves in extreme debt.

Connect CO_2 emissions with status.

[bsder]

I guess I wasn't very clear.

The problem is that if an individual makes every single choice they can to reduce their CO2 footprint, they still won't make a dent in CO2 emissions. It's effectively pissing in the ocean.

So, you can connect it to status and make people feel good, but you have to go after the big things if you want to actually dent CO2 emissions (this is simply a case of Amdahl's law in reverse).

And the big one is transportation. If you can get every single car and truck onto electricity, you win multiple times. Traffic jams don't convert energy to CO2; electric motors are quite a bit more efficient than internal combustion engines at low speeds with high torque; multiple distributed CO2 sources now become single point sources (at the power plant--much easier to apply technology to).

After that, the next big thing, if I remember correctly, is that you need to switch from AC transmission lines to high-voltage DC transmission lines as the loss is so much better. And a LOT of energy gets lost to simple transmission (also has the advantage that your grids are much easier to interconnect and stabilize).

After those two, then you take a look around and see what the next big 2 or 3 are, and go attack those. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Until you are at CO2 negative.

[siphon22]

Wouldn't it be the sorry saps who buy real Rolexes putting themselves in debt? The guys buying fake ones are the smart ones, getting status without paying the full price.

[edejong]

I was attempting to make the point that status and money are only partly connected.

[konschubert]

It's almost impossible to compute. What's the CO2 impact of your google searches?

What's easy and effective is a CO2 emissions tax directly on the emitter. Anyone who burns coal or gas or oil has to pay.

[edejong]

It's a bit old research, and probably flawed, but at least some researchers tried to answer this question back in 2008: https://searchengineland.com/calculating-the-carbon-footprin...

[indigo945]

I see big privacy concerns with this, because most likely the only practical way to make this work is to log every purchase any citizen does and store it for several years. It would also be very unlikely to incentivise those people who don't already care about climate change, and might actually serve to disincentivise them because being more wasteful makes them look better among their peers. For a case study on this, consider the Rolling Coal movement.

[edejong]

Supermarkets already do this. They store it for much longer than several years.

[easymodex]

I'm sure it would, but also some people would try to game it. Maybe also eco shaming would be involved. I'm all for it.

[rwnspace]

No. Individuals openly resisting norms alters the discourse and the boundaries of acceptable thought. Sufficiently aggregated, it is precisely what brings about change.

[konschubert]

I see that point.

But, what’s the new norm we want to establish?

“Let’s all use 20% less energy”

Vs

“Let’s produce all energy from renewable sources”

I feel like the second option is the only one that’s going to save us, and option 1 is a distraction.

If you were to, say, mount a solar panel on the roof of your electric car, that would probably be a better message to send than to drive less.

[rwnspace]

Yeah, for sure, there are degrees of success (as you suggest, "you might think it would be successful but it really isn't", or, "you spent loads of resources on something that felt good but achieved nothing when you could have done this unappealing effective thing"). I do think 'consume less, fix things, make reuse a hobby' is a good norm to work towards. I think the Restarters community is a good example (casual affiliation) [1]

I'm quick to defend the belief at a 'meta level'. It seems good to pretend we each can make a difference, in the same way it's useful to pretend free will exists: if you act 'as if' such a thing is true, then you avoid the outcome of acting as if it is false, one that seems to me utterly terrible - 'you could have made a difference, but you chose not to'.

I'd rather bring important but optimistic goals down a peg than abandon them - thinking I may as well leave things up to Moloch [2] leads me to despair.

[1] https://www.restarters.net/about [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[frankbreetz]

If enough people "spit on the fire" it will go out. And of course, the people spitting on the fire are the same people sounding the fire alarm.

I'm with though, people are too selfish and too short sighted to be mildly inconvenienced to spit on the fire and some government action needs to happen, I guess all we can do is be vocal about it and hope people cause science friendly politicians come election time

[dwaltrip]

You need to look at the size of the fire and how much spit everyone can produce. It might not be a viable solution. If so we, we should focus our energies on other solutions.

If we want to to beat climate change, we have to do the math. And then check it twice.

[imtringued]

What matters isn't the action. It's the will to solve the problem. Right now no one cares and therefore the politicians don't care either.