[larkery]

I agree with most of what you have said - we need to exert political pressure by taking action. This action probably needs to be disruptive and unpleasant to work, like the actions taken by the civil rights movements of the last century.

However, I would also like to put forward the following argument for why your own efforts could make a difference:

Imagine a trolley, speeding toward a junction. On one branch is a child, tied to the rails.

You are in the plant room and can cut power to the trolley, but this will only slow it down - the trolley's momentum alone will kill the child. However, you see across the way a stranger in the signal box, surrounded by levers controlling the points in the station. They are frantically pulling levers, but so far they haven't hit on the one which diverts the trolley.

Should you cut the power to slow the trolley?

We are on the tracks - if we survive, it will be because of a political or technical breakthrough before it's too late. We don't know precisely when too late is - it could be ten years, or twenty, or ten years ago and we're buggered. Each individual's emissions savings make too late a little later, which changes the odds of survival a little bit (or our estimate of the odds - this is probably the philosophical weak spot in the argument).

Maybe the plane trip you don't take or the car you stop driving or the product you choose not to buy is the marginal decision that gives time to avert disaster. If we do avert disaster, one of these decisions must be that marginal decision, somewhere, somewhen.

These choices are tickets in the not-extinction lottery, and it makes sense to play when you can, as much as you can.

[cyphar]

If you have a (virtually) unlimited amount of time and energy to expend on thinking about climate change and its impacts, go for it.

My point is that you will get far more bang for your buck if you spend energy on political action. Most ordinary people don't have time to spend on HN arguing about the best way of stopping climate change, they have other things to do in their lives -- and we should be convincing them to take political action (with us) instead of wasting their limited amounts of spare energy on minor personal changes that won't have as much of an impact.

[larkery]

I guess if you have a limited budget to spend, I would put political action at the top of the list. However, I think typically people have several limited budgets which are kind of incommensurable.

For example for me, the decision never to fly again has not cost me any action points to spend on my involvement in political campaigns, nor has that limited my decision to work in this field for a reduced wage than I could get in adtech, or whatever.

Where efforts are not orthogonal like this I'd say go for politics first though. So we are in agreement!