| Think of it this way: Someone's hosting a big party somewhere in the middle of nowhere, off-the-grid, so no grid electricity. Summer, sun shining, air is hot like a hair dryer. They put up a 20 kW generator run on gasoline. It's powering several fridges for cold drinks and ice, sound system, light effects, and so on. Unfortunately the heat is too much some old person, so they need to be kept cool in a tent and luckily there's an AC unit that could keep the temperature at some tolerable level. AC would use a few kW. Dang, the generator is maxed out already with all the other stuff. Aha, someone notices a guy who's plugged in a soldering iron and is burning patterns in pieces of wood. People start arguing with the guy to stop wasting electricity on his stupid wood art, because it'd be needed for the poor person suffering from the heat. This is what's happening here. People don't even think about questioning whether the party should keep going. Whether they should just switch off the fridges. Well, maybe they are questioning, but they still have most of their attention on this one guy using maybe 50 watts. Meanwhile the sick person in the tent is getting weaker. And people outside are now shouting at this guy to unplug his damned soldering iron or the person in the tent might die. |
You do instead point them to the big pieces of the pie chart.
Here's a good overview but anyone who wants to can find such info lying around everywhere: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantifie...