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Unless you are a genius inventor that's going to reduce everyone's carbon footprint the best thing you can do to help prevent global warming is to kill yourself

Unless you are a genius inventor that's going to reduce everyone's carbon footprint the best thing you can do to help prevent global warming is to kill yourself. Also, what if I just don't care?

shoo 11y ago
Well, you went there, regarding killing yourself, so let's think this through, using your own assumptions. Devil's advocate: I think your suggestion of suicide is perhaps one of the best ones possible if you want to prioritise reducing your personal carbon footprint over all other concerns, and are unwilling to (coercively or non-coercively) influence the behaviour of other people. There's not a lot of difference one of us can make, in terms of individual lifestyle choices. There's billions of us (and some of us, like myself, have carbon footprints of 10x or 40x those in other nations with less affluent lifestyles). If you are willing to non-coercively influence the behaviour of other people, then if you can convince 200 people to each reduce their carbon footprint by 1%, and that wouldn't have happened otherwise, you've just paid for your own carbon footprint twice over (assuming your footprints are all of the same size, etc). Note that this doesn't need technological wizardry - one might be able to do this merely by talking to people, or perhaps being involved in the odd act of political resistance. If you are willing to coercively influence the behaviour of other people, well, then you could e.g. kill 200 people (ideally those with large carbon footprints, who were not going to kill themselves or be killed otherwise) and yourself, and by your own logic that would seem strictly better (we're glossing over secondary consequences here, this might cause a huge backlash and security crackdown on environmental groups, which might make the overall situation worse, but you get the idea).

Unless you are a genius inventor that's going to reduce everyone's carbon footprint the best thing you can do to help prevent global warming is to kill yourself. Also, what if I just don't care?

shoo 11y ago

Well, you went there, regarding killing yourself, so let's think this through, using your own assumptions. Devil's advocate: I think your suggestion of suicide is perhaps one of the best ones possible if you want to prioritise reducing your personal carbon footprint over all other concerns, and are unwilling to (coercively or non-coercively) influence the behaviour of other people. There's not a lot of difference one of us can make, in terms of individual lifestyle choices. There's billions of us (and some of us, like myself, have carbon footprints of 10x or 40x those in other nations with less affluent lifestyles). If you are willing to non-coercively influence the behaviour of other people, then if you can convince 200 people to each reduce their carbon footprint by 1%, and that wouldn't have happened otherwise, you've just paid for your own carbon footprint twice over (assuming your footprints are all of the same size, etc). Note that this doesn't need technological wizardry - one might be able to do this merely by talking to people, or perhaps being involved in the odd act of political resistance. If you are willing to coercively influence the behaviour of other people, well, then you could e.g. kill 200 people (ideally those with large carbon footprints, who were not going to kill themselves or be killed otherwise) and yourself, and by your own logic that would seem strictly better (we're glossing over secondary consequences here, this might cause a huge backlash and security crackdown on environmental groups, which might make the overall situation worse, but you get the idea).