[mrshadowgoose]

Just building on this point. Over the last decade or two, it's become real popular to believe that nothing can be made truly carbon-neutral, and the only thing to be done is to constantly shame each other into feeling guilty and using less.

This is false. Completely and utterly false. And it's highly ineffective, as people will overwhelmingly prioritize comfort/happiness over the abstract concept of carbon production. All this really achieves is making the shamers feel like they're doing something, without actually really doing anything.

Energy is one of the fundamental resources underpinning literally everything used by humanity. Energy can be produced/captured in a carbon-neutral manner, and energy can be used to sequester carbon produced by processes that are not carbon-neutral, resulting in effective carbon-neutrality for those processes. And we have oh-so-much clean energy constantly reaching the surface of our planet. Significantly more than would be needed even if every person in the world had the energy consumption of a typical American.

So let's not be dumb about this. Shaming others into using less does not solve the fundamental issue. Solving the fundamental issue solves the fundamental issue. If you truly care about reducing humanity's carbon impact (and if we're not dumb about it, unwinding it too!), please write to your representatives advocating for carbon-neutrality legislation and carbon-neutral energy production. Encourage others to eschew the useless "carbon shaming" approach and focus on the fundamentals. Most typical consumers would simply be apathetic to this approach, but threaten to take away their comforts, and they will fight you. And they wouldn't be wrong to.