[WhompingWindows]

Those changes, mandating LEDs and lower speed limits, are vastly more important and easy to make than trying to get a ton of individuals to choose a different lifestyle. Psychology tells us about hedonistic adaptation, it'll be much easier for a government to make a big play than for tens of thousands of rich people to all individually give up their lifestyle. It'd be more influential for them to boycott gas planes and use their wealth to stimulate electric plane use, but again: psychology. That's why we need governments...

But think broader, about concrete and steel and shipping, the really hard areas. There is no "choice" about steel, it's a technological and policy issue...Even if we cleaned up our individual consumer choices, that won't change the need for steel or change how it's produced in a dirty way.

Look at a wind turbine, for instance. It's a giant tower of steel. Even though we need wind turbines as fast as possible, we still need dirty steel to ramp those up, and we need new tech to then make future steel cleaner.

This is why focusing on individual choice is so small. Even if all us rich Westerners went vegan and rode bikes to work, that wouldn't address all the tricky technological and chemical issues.