[shakezula]

I really loathe this line of thinking.

Even if every person on earth was carbon neutral, we’d only decrease emissions of GHG by 9%. Agricultural and industrial emissions across the board account for the rest.

We don’t put the burden of industrial byproducts on customers in other industries, but with CO2 and other greenhouse gases we’re supposed to be perfectly self regulating or else we’re shit out of luck? Absolute nonsense.

[missedthecue]

Sorry, I'm not understanding your math here. 9% of annual global GHG is 4.5 billion tons. there are ~8 billion humans on the planet. You're telling me the average person emits 0.56 tons per year?

You've either made a mistake somewhere in your arithmetic, or you've got a wonky way of attributing greenhouse gas emissions. More co2 than that is emitted in a round trip 2 hour hop in an airplane. (4.3 billion people fly on airlines every year). Would you say that taking an airline flight attributes GHG emissions to the passengers or to the airline?

[dcolkitt]

This just isn’t true. Agriculture and industrial emissions only account for 33% of GHG emissions—not 91% as you suggest.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

[jakelazaroff]

Look at the chart with electricity distributed amongst the other categories. It's 41% for agriculture and industrial.

Another 29% comes from transportation; this isn't broken this out between personal and commercial vehicles, but presumably you could attribute a significant amount of this to industrial rather than personal use.

[tremon]

So that 29% transportation figure is only personal vehicles then? It doesn't include trucks, freight ships or cargo planes?

[pyrale]

The co2 emited by these industries is also counted in people's co2 tab.

That is, if you decide to buy a new phone, the phonemaker will be counted as having used x co2, and you will be counted as having used x co2. Likewise, if you eat a steack, your co2 counter goes up, and agriculture's co2 also ticks up.

Each co2 emission has multiple labels: which industry made it, its country of emission, its final consumer, etc. Each of these labels is useful to consider it from a different point of view. However, If the consumer makes an effort, the industry's co2 will inevitably go down. If the industry is regulated more tightly, consumers' co2 count will decrease.

The only use of comparing industry emissions vs. individuals' emissions is when deciding which regulation would be the most effective (e.g. subsidizing solar panels vs. regulating the oil industry). Opposing consumers and the industries providing consumer goods is meaningless.

[kkjjkgjjgg]

How can that make sense? Agriculture and Industry merely produce things for people to consume. So if everybody was to be carbon neutral, Agriculture and Industry would have to be carbon neutral, too. Otherwise not everybody would be carbon neutral, because people would be responsible for the emissions from Agriculture and Industry.

[triceratops]

> Even if every person on earth was carbon neutral, we’d only decrease emissions of GHG by 9%.

Yes, if we maintained the current economic and political system. But that would be impossible if every person on earth felt deeply about their carbon footprint. They'd throw out of office any politician that didn't support immediate action on climate change. Governments would be forced to regulate the s*** out of polluters and go to net-zero ASAP.

[shakezula]

People _do_ care deeply for the planet. Climate change policies are widely popular, despite what the media might tell you.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...

However, our political and capital power to do anything about it has been systematically and purposefully limited.

When we discovered the dangers of CFCs, we didn’t depend on the public at large to stop using items that produced CFC byproducts. We didn’t point to personal CFC footprints and little CFC calculators that guilt trip you for existing. Why should we do the same with CO2?

[triceratops]

> People _do_ care deeply for the planet

They say they care. I'm sure they even believe they care. But at the ballot box, they act very differently.

Why does almost no Green Party win an outright majority in any European national election?

Why does half the US continue to vote for a political party that outright denies man-made climate change?

> our political and capital power to do anything about it has been systematically and purposefully limited.

By the current set of politicians. Who are ultimately voted in by voters. If climate change was really a top-priority issue for everyone, we'd have a different set of people in office.

If you think about it, voting isn't that much of a personal sacrifice. No one is asking people to ride bikes in freezing conditions, or go vegan. And yet, people can't even do that.

We could take action on CFCs by enacting laws. Because we had slightly more sensible politicians back then. If we want sensible politicians again, we have to vote for them.

[aspyct]

I think it's worse than that.

We all pretty much want the same: survive (at least). The thing is, we can't seem to agree on the best way to do so. ICE vs electric cars. Nuclear vs wind vs solar panels. Apartment vs homesteading...

So when voting, we all vote for what we believe in. But we don't believe in the same thing. And then there's "thinking fashion".

All in all, we do a step in one direction, then in the opposite direction. And we get nowhere.

[the_other]

> Why does almost no Green Party win an outright majority in any European national election? > Why does half the US continue to vote for a political party that outright denies man-made climate change?

The story I have heard a few times is that the candidate with the biggest budget wins. Climate movements have smaller budgets than incumbents funded by decades-deep vested interest.

[shakezula]

> But at the ballot box, they act very differently.

> Why does almost no Green Party win an outright majority in any European national election?

> By the current set of politicians. Who are ultimately voted in by voters.

> voting isn't that much of a personal sacrifice

> Why does half the US continue to vote for a political party that outright denies man-made climate change?

Average citizen preferences have no bearing[1] on the adoption of legislation. [1](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...)

> Because we had slightly more sensible politicians back then

I cannot understate how much I disagree with the idea that politics was somehow more sensible "back then". Politicians are not more stubborn or unreasonable today, because __people__ are not more stubborn or unreasonable today.

[triceratops]

> Average citizen preferences have no bearing[1] on the adoption of legislation.

Stated vs revealed preferences. Saying you care and voting like you care are 2 very different things.

> I cannot understate how much I disagree with the idea that politics was somehow more sensible "back then".

How did every country manage to come to an agreement on phasing out CFCs? How did the US set up the EPA? And can you imagine proposing something like a public library system today, if it didn't already exist?

Politicians were equally (or more) corrupt, morally suspect, and duplicitous in the past. I just think that they also managed to pass more legislation about things that really mattered.

[shakezula]

> stated vs revealed preferences

It doesn’t matter what your stated vs. revealed preference is when that preference doesn’t matter to the status quo.

> How did every country manage to come to an agreement on phasing out CFCs?

Every country /didn’t/ come to an agreement on CFCs, that’s how. China is still emitting measurable amounts as recently as 2019[1].

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1193-4

They were not more reasonable, the system and incentives were simply different. A world view where people are more or less reasonable based solely on the year they are being examined is not a world view based in reality.

[pyrale]

> Why does almost no Green Party win an outright majority in any European national election?

Because ecology is not the only thing people have in mind. That's a limit of direct democracy, as opposed to a system where people would vote for policies.

Also because some of these parties are trainwrecks.

[chriswarbo]

> They say they care. I'm sure they even believe they care. But at the ballot box, they act very differently.

One catch-all vote every few years is a very noisy metric for measuring people's agreement with one specific issue. Even more so when the choice is quite limited (e.g. two-horse races, between mostly similar horses, like many US votes between slightly-more-right-wing-authoritarian versus slightly-less-right-wing-authoritarian)).

[triceratops]

> with one specific issue.

It's not any old issue though. It's an existential one.

[missedthecue]

I think there is a strong case of stated vs revealed preference going on here

[samatman]

This can only be sloppy accounting, and I'm disappointed to see it here of all places.

If every person on earth was carbon neutral, that would mean GHG emissions were decreased by 100% once every sink was accounted for.

That's definitional, that's tautological, if you're only counting 9% of someone's carbon budget as "theirs" that's on your model.

[shakezula]

The point is that not every emission can be blamed on the end consumer. Some can and should be, yes, like commercial flights.

Even if every consumer ate vegan and only used a bike, industrial emissions will continue chugging away because the vast majority of those emissions are not serving the end consumer.

We didn't blame the end consumer for CFCs even when they were buying and spraying them into the air in record numbers. CO2 is no different and the blame should not solely reside on us in some hypercapitalistic guilt trip.

[samatman]

Blame isn't a useful concept and isn't an excuse for being sloppy in carbon accounting.

A person's carbon footprint is the amount of CO2 emitted to support that person's lifestyle. It doesn't matter whether it's the exhaust from delivering the widget or the amortized emissions from pouring the base of the factory, that's the carbon footprint.

Pretending that industrial emissions don't serve the end consumer is much worse than pretending that lifestyle interventions are sufficient. At least riding a bike gets you in shape; ignoring the bike factory and the whole trucking and shipping infrastructure which creates and transports the bike is, well, solving 9% of the problem.

[shakezula]

The fact of the matter is that every citizen in the world could do all of the "green" things in their daily lives that they can and it would barely tick the needle on emissions down. The U.S. military itself is one of the worst polluters in the world.

A person's "carbon footprint" cannot extend all the way to the CO2 emitted when pouring the base of the factory that produces the gas in their car, in the same way that buying clothes at the GAP cannot condemn you for child slavery that the corporation benefits from.

You cannot put the onus for ethical business on the end consumer when the corporation pursues and benefits from unethical behavior, often times without the end consumer ever knowing about that behavior. It's ridiculous, and completely ignores the class element in the whole discussion.

This is a problem that must be solved from the top down, and corporate messaging to saddle the responsibility on the end user is disingenuous at best, incredibly maligned at worst.

[shakezula]

It is not sloppy accounting. The fact of the matter is that every citizen in the world could do all of the "green" things in their daily lives that they can and it would barely tick the needle on emissions down.

A person's "carbon footprint" cannot extend all the way to pouring the base of the factory that produces the gas in their car, in the same way that buying clothes at the GAP cannot condemn you for child slavery that the corporation benefits from. You cannot put the onus for ethical business on the end consumer when the corporation pursues and benefits from unethical behavior.

This is a problem that must be solved from the top down, and corporate messaging to saddle the responsibility on the end user is ridiculous.

[asiachick]

> Agricultural and industrial emissions across the board account for the rest.

Agricultural and industrial emissions only exist because of consumer demand. If consumers stop consuming the things that cause those emissions the producers will stop making them.