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yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip This. Every single person who claims they believe global climate

yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip This. Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now. Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and using gasoline-powered vehicles (directly or by proxy), you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't. And "leaders" who take private jets to "climate change policy conferences" are straight-up charlatans. (I'd be construed as a "climate change denier", and yet I do more about mitigating climate change than anyone else I know.) Be the change you want in the world. You can afford it.

savanaly 9y ago
This doesn't add up to me. I can be one of the two people in a prisoner's dilemma scenario and fully acknowledge the reality that I might be heading to jail while still playing the selfish strategy of snitching. Just because you recognize that your personal actions won't affect the outcome as it pertains to you doesn't mean you can't recognize that the personal actions of a large number of other people will affect the outcome as it pertains to you.
- roenxi 9y ago
  This isn't prisoner's dilemma though - everyone has a full ability to communicate with each other. That breaks a pretty basic assumption. To stretch your analogy, you are playing prisoners dilemma with someone who is swearing he will snitch, has a lawyer who is saying "my client will cooperate fully with the police" and who has signed a document explaining the facts.
  - savanaly 9y ago
    In the classical prisoner's dilemma it doesn't matter whether the prisoners can fully communicate with each other or not as long as it hold that they cannot change their move after seeing what the other guy moved. And it's perverse because they both have a strategy A that strictly dominates B but if they both play A then they're worse off than if they both played B.
    - Retra 9y ago
      That is equivalent to not communicating. In the classical prisoner's dilemma, you do assume that the other person will make their decision independently of you. (Which is also equivalent to not communicating.) Real humans don't do what the classical case says they do, because humans can empathize with each other and work together even without explicitly communicating. Political organizations, though? Not as much.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      This thread is already insane in that the metaphor is getting more complicated than what it was trying to explain, but... ...trying to minimise one's carbon footprint is, quite obviously, an iterated prisoner's dilemma: you can observe other's behaviour every day (and vice versa) and react accordingly. The problem is that nobody plays it with a single other person, but with "all of humanity" instead. Any change in others' behaviour will almost certainly be only gradual, and not accessible to daily perception.
WalterBright 9y ago
Changing economic behavior with public campaigns has a pretty much zero success rate. Anyone remember Pres Ford's "WIP" buttons (Whip Inflation Now)? It had the hubris that inflation could be stopped if only people would just stop raising prices. Even as a kid, I laughed at the absurdity of that campaign. Of course it had zero effect. Something that will work is to tax pollution, i.e. a carbon tax. Making it more expensive will do far more to influence behavior away from it than any marketing campaign. And besides, it raises spending money for the government, too. Using the tax system to "internalize the externalities" (economist jargon) is an efficient and effective way to do it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- alexanderstears 9y ago
  Changing economic behavior with public campaigns has a pretty much zero success rate. yet advertising and marketing happens.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    When it's of immediate local benefit to the individual, yes.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Ford wasn't very good at acronyms?
  - ScottBurson 9y ago
    It was WIN, not WIP.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      Thanks for the correction.
notyourday 9y ago
> Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now. Let me get it straight, you mean Leonardo Di Caprio, George Clooney and Al Gore should live like the peasants? Please, hold my beer.
- ctdonath 9y ago
  Cognitive dissonance is unbecoming. Spewing tons of CO2 en route to a CO2 control conference, when the same ends could be met via teleconference, is hypocrisy. You can live well while reducing your impact on the environment. They certainly have the money to.
  - comex 9y ago
    Is it? I don’t think teleconferencing technology is at a state (yet) where it’s nearly as effective at conveying messages and building relationships as in-person conferencing. It‘s closer than it used to be, and it may get closer still in the future (e.g. if VR gets good enough that people want to use it for that), but for now it’s not there. Teleconferencing also has a public perception of being cheaper and thus less important. So, if the goal of a conference is to cause some measurable reduction in the expected amount of carbon being dumped in the future, by encouraging government action and such - it’s certainly debatable whether conferences can actually achieve that goal, but that’s the goal - then a virtual conference would probably result in a substantially smaller reduction. And if a substantial portion of a measurable change is measurable, then it’s a lot bigger than the CO2 cost of some plane tickets, which at a global scale is immeasurable. On the other hand, making a point of using telecommunications could make for a good PR stunt, which could increase attention and thus effectiveness. It could also help promote the idea of using teleconferencing as an environmental measure. Overall, though, I’m not sure how good a stunt it’d be - it might give people the impression that fighting climate change requires people to make great personal sacrifices in their way of life, which, whether or not it’s true, could hurt the cause by creating cognitive dissonance. (I’m pretty sure it’s not true, per se. Rather, it would require a ton of money, which would hurt people’s way of life indirectly, but not as obviously.)
jacobolus 9y ago
There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking personal steps, but by themselves they are largely worthless. It’s like optimizing an I/O bound program by speeding up some of the arithmetic operations not on any critical path. Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic – not just useless but actively counterproductive because it makes people dismiss you as an arrogant jerk. What’s needed are large-scale policy changes (international agreements, public investment in research and alternative infrastructure, changes to zoning laws, carbon taxes, regulations of agricultural runoff, crackdown on tax evasion and money laundering and international bribery, ...), which takes significant amounts of political organizing effort, money, and political capital (including flying various leaders around on jets).
- jjawssd 9y ago
  Your basic unquestioned assumptions are that humans have a non-negligible effect on global warming and that global warming exists. Instead of jumping to conclusions, we must also question and analyze the existing evidence for the premise.
- alexanderstears 9y ago
  Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic That's a strawman. What the parent comment says is that people's behavior reveals their preferences. A more clear example is this - someone who drives a Suburban for fun and burns their trash isn't in a good position to demand that others go out of their way to treat the earth better.
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    > people's behavior reveals their preferences Only if they are rational economic actors. If you live in the sticks and want to buy food which is several kilometers away, do you throw up your hands in the air and starve so that you don't use your car?
KVFinn 9y ago
>Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now. This being effective seems contrary to everything we know about economics. If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people and so the overall consumption is hardly impacted. Historically this is the case. If you don't price an externality into the market with a tax or credit or it's useless. Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and do not support pigouvian taxes or other policy that will actually have an impact, you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't. You're just concerned about projecting the appearance that you care.
- alexanderstears 9y ago
  If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people Not really, oil extraction is capital intensive, oil wells have finite lives, and you can count on people extracting the cheapest oil first. As fossil fuel demand drops, the risk of operating a well increases and that makes borrowing more expensive, the capital costs will be amortized across less energy so the energy will have to be more expensive, and energy should naturally get more expensive as time goes on and the easiest oil is depleted. Sure, technology changes and reduces the cost of extraction but moving away from fossil fuels isn't an incentive for developing more extraction technology. Not to mention that people's investments in alternative fuels / transportation brings the costs down for everyone else and as costs go down, more and more people will be willing to pay the eco-friendly premium until some day they're less expensive and people select eco-friendly consumption out of their own self-interest. I think this day is closer than most people realize for electric cars. Gear heads and regular folks are going to love electric cars when the batteries get better, at some point, it's going to cost a lot extra to get a ICE vehicle and that's going to be a rent extraction on idiots who dream of rolling coal in F250s.
- munificent 9y ago
  > You're just concerned about projecting the appearance > that you care. This is a completely unnecessary, uncharitable attack. The reasonable interpretation of the parent comment is that they do actually care about climate change but the two of you disagree on which mechanisms will most effectively reduce it.
spraak 9y ago
This reminds me of the whole "take shorter showers" thing. The amount of water consumed taking showers is minuscule compared to how much water is used for industrial agriculture. It's not going to make a difference to take a 5 minute shower vs. 10 minutes. So it overall feels very defeating as an individual to try to make a change.
- grzm 9y ago
  Definitely agreed that it's important to take a look at all of the domains that have an affect on the situation. That said, one of the things "take shorter showers" and similar efforts does do is raise awareness and helps people keep it in mind as part of their daily life. This can have an effect on the decisions they make in other areas as well.
- ctdonath 9y ago
  But if you're pushing for "take shorter showers" legislation imposed on all, I expect you to take shorter showers now.
mikeash 9y ago
To me, this sounds like “if you’re not down in steerage baling water out of the sinking Titanic, you’re not seriously concerned about it sinking.” It won’t make any detectable difference if I go 100% solar and vegetarian, or if I spend all my disposable income on gasoline that I burn in amusing ways. Collective action is the only thing that matters for this. If you go all-in on a low carbon lifestyle for yourself, and your friend nudges government policy towards something that reduces emissions, your friend has done far more to mitigate climate change than you have.
- ctdonath 9y ago
  But if you can't show that "100% solar & vegetarian" is a viable & desirable choice, you're not going to convince others to. Imposition under threat of police action will only invoke shifting bad choices, strain economy, and inspire malice. As I recall from the time, the rise of the SUV came from imposition of emissions limits on cars, which didn't cover trucks so the spacious & fumes-spewing "enclosed car-styled truck" was inspired. Did that help emissions in the long run? Here in the southern USA, 2/3rds of vehicles aren't emissions-efficient sedans.

savanaly 9y ago

This doesn't add up to me. I can be one of the two people in a prisoner's dilemma scenario and fully acknowledge the reality that I might be heading to jail while still playing the selfish strategy of snitching. Just because you recognize that your personal actions won't affect the outcome as it pertains to you doesn't mean you can't recognize that the personal actions of a large number of other people will affect the outcome as it pertains to you.

roenxi 9y ago
This isn't prisoner's dilemma though - everyone has a full ability to communicate with each other. That breaks a pretty basic assumption. To stretch your analogy, you are playing prisoners dilemma with someone who is swearing he will snitch, has a lawyer who is saying "my client will cooperate fully with the police" and who has signed a document explaining the facts.
- savanaly 9y ago
  In the classical prisoner's dilemma it doesn't matter whether the prisoners can fully communicate with each other or not as long as it hold that they cannot change their move after seeing what the other guy moved. And it's perverse because they both have a strategy A that strictly dominates B but if they both play A then they're worse off than if they both played B.
  - Retra 9y ago
    That is equivalent to not communicating. In the classical prisoner's dilemma, you do assume that the other person will make their decision independently of you. (Which is also equivalent to not communicating.) Real humans don't do what the classical case says they do, because humans can empathize with each other and work together even without explicitly communicating. Political organizations, though? Not as much.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    This thread is already insane in that the metaphor is getting more complicated than what it was trying to explain, but... ...trying to minimise one's carbon footprint is, quite obviously, an iterated prisoner's dilemma: you can observe other's behaviour every day (and vice versa) and react accordingly. The problem is that nobody plays it with a single other person, but with "all of humanity" instead. Any change in others' behaviour will almost certainly be only gradual, and not accessible to daily perception.

WalterBright 9y ago

Changing economic behavior with public campaigns has a pretty much zero success rate. Anyone remember Pres Ford's "WIP" buttons (Whip Inflation Now)? It had the hubris that inflation could be stopped if only people would just stop raising prices. Even as a kid, I laughed at the absurdity of that campaign. Of course it had zero effect. Something that will work is to tax pollution, i.e. a carbon tax. Making it more expensive will do far more to influence behavior away from it than any marketing campaign. And besides, it raises spending money for the government, too. Using the tax system to "internalize the externalities" (economist jargon) is an efficient and effective way to do it.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
alexanderstears 9y ago
Changing economic behavior with public campaigns has a pretty much zero success rate. yet advertising and marketing happens.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  When it's of immediate local benefit to the individual, yes.
jessaustin 9y ago
Ford wasn't very good at acronyms?
- ScottBurson 9y ago
  It was WIN, not WIP.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Thanks for the correction.

notyourday 9y ago

> Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now. Let me get it straight, you mean Leonardo Di Caprio, George Clooney and Al Gore should live like the peasants? Please, hold my beer.

ctdonath 9y ago
Cognitive dissonance is unbecoming. Spewing tons of CO2 en route to a CO2 control conference, when the same ends could be met via teleconference, is hypocrisy. You can live well while reducing your impact on the environment. They certainly have the money to.
- comex 9y ago
  Is it? I don’t think teleconferencing technology is at a state (yet) where it’s nearly as effective at conveying messages and building relationships as in-person conferencing. It‘s closer than it used to be, and it may get closer still in the future (e.g. if VR gets good enough that people want to use it for that), but for now it’s not there. Teleconferencing also has a public perception of being cheaper and thus less important. So, if the goal of a conference is to cause some measurable reduction in the expected amount of carbon being dumped in the future, by encouraging government action and such - it’s certainly debatable whether conferences can actually achieve that goal, but that’s the goal - then a virtual conference would probably result in a substantially smaller reduction. And if a substantial portion of a measurable change is measurable, then it’s a lot bigger than the CO2 cost of some plane tickets, which at a global scale is immeasurable. On the other hand, making a point of using telecommunications could make for a good PR stunt, which could increase attention and thus effectiveness. It could also help promote the idea of using teleconferencing as an environmental measure. Overall, though, I’m not sure how good a stunt it’d be - it might give people the impression that fighting climate change requires people to make great personal sacrifices in their way of life, which, whether or not it’s true, could hurt the cause by creating cognitive dissonance. (I’m pretty sure it’s not true, per se. Rather, it would require a ton of money, which would hurt people’s way of life indirectly, but not as obviously.)

jacobolus 9y ago

There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking personal steps, but by themselves they are largely worthless. It’s like optimizing an I/O bound program by speeding up some of the arithmetic operations not on any critical path. Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic – not just useless but actively counterproductive because it makes people dismiss you as an arrogant jerk. What’s needed are large-scale policy changes (international agreements, public investment in research and alternative infrastructure, changes to zoning laws, carbon taxes, regulations of agricultural runoff, crackdown on tax evasion and money laundering and international bribery, ...), which takes significant amounts of political organizing effort, money, and political capital (including flying various leaders around on jets).

jjawssd 9y ago
Your basic unquestioned assumptions are that humans have a non-negligible effect on global warming and that global warming exists. Instead of jumping to conclusions, we must also question and analyze the existing evidence for the premise.
alexanderstears 9y ago
Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic That's a strawman. What the parent comment says is that people's behavior reveals their preferences. A more clear example is this - someone who drives a Suburban for fun and burns their trash isn't in a good position to demand that others go out of their way to treat the earth better.
- JetSpiegel 9y ago
  > people's behavior reveals their preferences Only if they are rational economic actors. If you live in the sticks and want to buy food which is several kilometers away, do you throw up your hands in the air and starve so that you don't use your car?

KVFinn 9y ago

>Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now. This being effective seems contrary to everything we know about economics. If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people and so the overall consumption is hardly impacted. Historically this is the case. If you don't price an externality into the market with a tax or credit or it's useless. Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and do not support pigouvian taxes or other policy that will actually have an impact, you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't. You're just concerned about projecting the appearance that you care.

alexanderstears 9y ago
If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people Not really, oil extraction is capital intensive, oil wells have finite lives, and you can count on people extracting the cheapest oil first. As fossil fuel demand drops, the risk of operating a well increases and that makes borrowing more expensive, the capital costs will be amortized across less energy so the energy will have to be more expensive, and energy should naturally get more expensive as time goes on and the easiest oil is depleted. Sure, technology changes and reduces the cost of extraction but moving away from fossil fuels isn't an incentive for developing more extraction technology. Not to mention that people's investments in alternative fuels / transportation brings the costs down for everyone else and as costs go down, more and more people will be willing to pay the eco-friendly premium until some day they're less expensive and people select eco-friendly consumption out of their own self-interest. I think this day is closer than most people realize for electric cars. Gear heads and regular folks are going to love electric cars when the batteries get better, at some point, it's going to cost a lot extra to get a ICE vehicle and that's going to be a rent extraction on idiots who dream of rolling coal in F250s.
munificent 9y ago
> You're just concerned about projecting the appearance > that you care. This is a completely unnecessary, uncharitable attack. The reasonable interpretation of the parent comment is that they do actually care about climate change but the two of you disagree on which mechanisms will most effectively reduce it.

spraak 9y ago

This reminds me of the whole "take shorter showers" thing. The amount of water consumed taking showers is minuscule compared to how much water is used for industrial agriculture. It's not going to make a difference to take a 5 minute shower vs. 10 minutes. So it overall feels very defeating as an individual to try to make a change.

grzm 9y ago
Definitely agreed that it's important to take a look at all of the domains that have an affect on the situation. That said, one of the things "take shorter showers" and similar efforts does do is raise awareness and helps people keep it in mind as part of their daily life. This can have an effect on the decisions they make in other areas as well.
ctdonath 9y ago
But if you're pushing for "take shorter showers" legislation imposed on all, I expect you to take shorter showers now.

mikeash 9y ago

To me, this sounds like “if you’re not down in steerage baling water out of the sinking Titanic, you’re not seriously concerned about it sinking.” It won’t make any detectable difference if I go 100% solar and vegetarian, or if I spend all my disposable income on gasoline that I burn in amusing ways. Collective action is the only thing that matters for this. If you go all-in on a low carbon lifestyle for yourself, and your friend nudges government policy towards something that reduces emissions, your friend has done far more to mitigate climate change than you have.

ctdonath 9y ago
But if you can't show that "100% solar & vegetarian" is a viable & desirable choice, you're not going to convince others to. Imposition under threat of police action will only invoke shifting bad choices, strain economy, and inspire malice. As I recall from the time, the rise of the SUV came from imposition of emissions limits on cars, which didn't cover trucks so the spacious & fumes-spewing "enclosed car-styled truck" was inspired. Did that help emissions in the long run? Here in the southern USA, 2/3rds of vehicles aren't emissions-efficient sedans.