What Are You Willing to Sacrifice to Stop Climate Change?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-15/climate-change-action-is-hard-because-no-one-wants-to-sacrifice

by toomuchtodo • 5 years ago

22 38 5 years ago

mkeespiet• 5 years ago

Long showers.. in the Netherlands most of the houses are connected to natural gas for heating and showering. We installed multiple solar panels and a heat pump, so we do not use any natural gas anymore (cooking is also electrical). This means we cannot shower all day long, but it is worth it to use only electricity!

thomaszander5• 5 years ago

The above comment may be very weird to people not living in The Netherlands as we all know that there is nothing wrong with natural gas, its one of the most eco friendly ways to heat stuff.

But in The Netherlands some government officials have taken the point of view that natural gas is Bad, and we should all pay lots of money to move to heat pumps and similar in order to get rid of it.

The sad thing is that most people in The Netherlands are also lied to by those same politicians about how "green energy" actually is created. For instance after years of planting thousands of windmills (both on land and on sea) the wind-energy electricity generated is still around 1% (I'm actually being generous).

Similarly many farming fields have been converted to now have solar panels, and many many houses have them by default. Same here, total energy created: about 1%.

What government still calls "renewables" is biomass. Which is actually the burning of trees. This is massively bad for nature because those trees are the one thing that actually converts that bad co2 to breathable air again.

Real renewable energy we get from imports from countries like Norway: water power. Around 8%.

But, here is the fun part: the vast majority of our electricity comes from, you guessed it, burning natural gas.

People that invest €10K to have a heat pump and solar power still use a very large amount of grid-electricity, which comes from burning natural gas.

oefnak• 5 years ago

Well, there's also the issue that our national gas reserves lie beneath a city in which there are already many earthquakes thanks to the gas drilling.

Zababa• 5 years ago

we all know that there is nothing wrong with natural gas, its one of the most eco friendly ways to heat stuff.

What do you mean by this? Natural gas is another fossible fuel, it's far from being "eco friendly". It's better than coal or oil but that's about it.

scotty794• 5 years ago

This page states that in 2020 wind provided more than 11% of consumed energy in Netherlands.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_Netherland...

scotty794• 5 years ago

Since heat pumps are over 100% efficient it still might be (is) better to burn natural gas to produce the electricity to power heat pump than to just burn gas for heat.

ccvannorman• 5 years ago

Offense is the best defense. It's naive to think that as an individual giving up a car or showers will make a difference compared to the unfettered pollution of multinationals. Policy change, law, economic incentives, with teeth - this is how to make an impact. Stay in your long shower, and pick up the phone afterward to call your congressperson, or to raise awareness about a climate bill, or to donate to a climate nonprofit.

luckylion2• 5 years ago

Some multinational will create much more pollution than any individual, but it's also effectively distributed on all of their customers "account". So while a toaster manufacturer might create more pollution than someone's trip to Bali, if you divide by the numbers of toasters the produce, that 20k km round trip will outweigh the toaster. And the individual has total control over their holidays and can make a difference. They just choose not to, because it's easier to say "the world must change, what good is it if I do something".

ZeroGravitas6• 5 years ago

Your slightly absurd comparison of a toaster to a trip to Bali has made me realise I don't actually have a solid grasp of the relative carbon contribution of each, compared with each other and the total that a society outputs.

You hear a lot about flying to holidays being something we have to give up, but that seems so flagrantly designed to annoy people that I feel the source is more likely to be climate change deniers than actual environmentalists.

Are holidays really a big thing? I know flights are technically hard to decarbonise today, but I don't think I've ever seen numbers suggesting they're a big priority compared with the low hanging fruit or that individual action is the best way to solve it.

innagadadavida• 5 years ago

Buy used car instead of new one. This is easily better than buying a new electric car and it amazes me that no one advocates for it.

Avoid throwaway bags, packaging and utensils.

samvega_• 5 years ago

People are already doing it, and naturally it doesn't scale. Brand new cars are a necessary condition for the used car market. That doesn't mean it couldn't get better. But then again old cars are usually less energy efficient anyway, so who knows where to draw the line.

jnwatson• 5 years ago

It does help. As used car price increase, it makes sense to fix up previously marginal cars. Anything that reduces the production of new cars is good.

ZeroGravitas6• 5 years ago

I don't think your car suggestion makes sense, I'll try and locate some numbers to demonstrate.

dagw• 5 years ago

This is easily better than buying a new electric car

From what I can find it is far from clear and really depends on how old/inefficient the used car is and, most importantly, how much you drive.

tazedsoul• 5 years ago

Individuals can’t fix this problem. That people don’t understand this yet is not a good sign

Tarsul• 5 years ago

Individuals do. By voting people in power who care and act.

goatlover• 5 years ago

The article states that a significant majority of voters don't support carbon taxation or any legislation that would impact their lifestyle.

hourislate• 5 years ago

"because the idea of a carbon tax is toxically unpopular".

Nice blame the voters....The solution for every problem (especially in the West) is a new tax. Why not just make some changes to existing laws to save the planet. Where you don't even need the voters. Firm up the building codes to create better and more efficient houses/condos/commercial properties. Encourage more work from home to cut down on the amount of traffic, outlaw coal power, no new drilling for oil unless you can capture the flare off, etc. I could think of 100 things that would make a bigger difference than a Bullshit Carbon Tax that our kakistocracy wants so they can get rich off of it. Do folks actually understand how little changes/tweaks to the stupid way most Americans live could make massive real world differences. Just discouraging lawns in places where they shouldn't be growing would reduce Carbon (mowing/care) and save 100's of billions of gallons of water (Texas, Arizona and any other hot dry state).

The arrogance of the following statement. Shifting the blame on us and constantly creating this Left vs Right bullshit.

All of this leads to a difficult truth: The problem here lies not with the politicians, or even with the billionaires or oil companies. It lies with voters themselves, who recognize that climate change is a real problem but are not necessarily willing to sacrifice much of anything to tackle it.

dusted• 5 years ago

I'm willing to sacrifice a lot of things, my diesel and gasoline cars, my plastic straws even my lovely incandescent lightbulbs with their soft warm full light, but only as long as it's mandatory (and enforced) that _EVERYONE_ else does it as well.

If not everyone, I'm not willing to sacrifice anything at all.

helloworld112• 5 years ago

Then obviously no one will sacrifice much of anything, because some subset will always be willing to cheat or ignore the call to these sorts of sacrifices. This is why collective action efforts at changing major problems are so fraught with difficulty. Instead, fundamental practical changes in the direction of better ways at doing things that also happen to be easier and more convenient are what really drives positive innovation in many cases. Example: the digitization of most documents just made it convenient for more people to stop using vast reams of paper in certain contexts.

dane-pgp• 5 years ago

some subset will always be willing to cheat

I think a more charitable way to interpret the parent post is that they want a good faith effort made to enforce the mandates, without requiring that those efforts be 100% effective at achieving compliance.

Personally I think that if someone cares about an issue which requires collective action, then their moral obligation is only to contribute to the solution more than the median person. Of course it is impossible for most people to do better than the median, but if most people pursue this goal, it would bring the median down, while creating a democratic mandate for reducing the maximum.

jka• 5 years ago

If behvaiours cause damage to (inter)national safety, then cheating - in ways that are generally hard to hide - should become a lot less socially acceptable.

People will also, I reckon, begin to realize that a lot of the externalities from CO2-emitting activities (car noise, pollution, traffic and lack of exercise, for example) are things that they won't want to return to.

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

I'll put up with a lot in return for not having to spend 2 hours a day in my car commuting.

helloworld112• 5 years ago

Worth noting here that many of the so called organic initiatives targeted at getting individuals to make little silly little sacrifices such as the use of straws, or shorter showers or etc and etc are lovingly embraced by the world's worst megapolluting megacorporations exactly because they nicely deviate attention from their colossal carbon footprints (https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...)

and throw responsibility on ordinary people to a completely unwarranted degree. Exxon Mobil, Saudi Aramco et al have plenty of reason to love the notion of hundreds of millions of individual millenials and others feeling guilty because they used a straw for their soft drink today, or asked for a plastic bag during their grocery shopping.

Because a great number of influencer, celebrity and media types also know that exhortations of this individual kind get them much more brownie points and media attention, they're complicit in the same misplaced guilt crusade. Posting on social media about how some oil corporation should dump 20% less carbon into the atmosphere doesn't have nearly the same level of pop culture trendiness or immediate satisfaction of making someone comment about how they'll change their ways.

ZeroGravitas6• 5 years ago

The straw thing is a good case study.

As far as I'm aware that started with a picture of a turtle being affected by plastic ocean waste.

Getting rid of non-biodegradable disposable items has always been a good idea, since they are designed to be thrown away. And the best way to do that has always been global industry regulation and producer responsibility after initial awareness raising.

However, the only context it gets mentioned in now is by people saying that its not going to stop climate change (which it was never claimed to) and that individual action is pointless.

It's like theres a whole industry dedicated to undermining people's faith in reasonable efforts to fix actual problems. And since their main weapon is subverting human biases they can attack from both sides at once.

So banning disposable plastic straws is at once a regulatory overreach of communist-hippies and also a conspiracy by big oil to continue polluting because all those stupid people think straws are the problem when really its foreigners or liberals or environmentalists or whatever other convenient scapegoat can be found.

Basically anyone angry about how were dealing with climate change and directs that anger at anyone other than the fossil fuel extraction industry and their enablers in the media and politics strikes me as super suspicious.

Corporations are effectively sociopathic and this feels like the stage after the denials and the minimizations in a typical narcissistic abuse cycle "well if it is happening and if it is a big deal then it's your fault" and hoping you forget all the times they denied it was a problem or that it wasn't a big deal.

anm89• 5 years ago

Nothing.

Nothing in the sense of personal decision.

I would happily sacrifice most things if they were enforced at high enough levels to actually make a difference.

I would happily accept a ban on single USA plastics. I would happily accept a ban a few years out on gas cars. I would happily accept mandatory changes in packaging laws.

But I'm not going to torture myself for no gain to anyone by enforcing strict standards on myself that are so marginal to be totally meaningless in the bigger picture. I don't expect anyone else to either.

I figure we'll get sensible rules when the pain to the average person is strong enough that it's easier to accept that than whatever else we are dealing with and not a minute sooner.

redhale• 5 years ago

Any and all aversion to widespread nuclear power development and adoption.

What Are You Willing to Sacrifice to Stop Climate Change?

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