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The problem with individual action is that it requires a collective effort to make such sacrifices worth it, and most people aren’t willing able to make all or

The problem with individual action is that it requires a collective effort to make such sacrifices worth it, and most people aren’t willing able to make all or any of those sacrifices. For example: one cannot simply replace air travel with trains in the US. Amtrak is wholly inadequate to act in an interstate commuter transport capacity in the vast majority of the US. Also, I’m not at a point in my career where I can afford to work part time. Part time software engineering jobs are hard to find in the US, and part time jobs don’t provide benefits like healthcare. Individuals are going to look at this and say “why should I make these sacrifices when I know that others aren’t going to make them?”

perfunctory 7y ago
That's kind of the point. Stop thinking about "most people". Do it for yourself. If you believe in the climate emergency that is. You might be pleasantly surprised to see your friends around you follow the suit.
- Redoubts 7y ago
  I can’t even get my friends and coworkers to vote.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    Perhaps they might be persuaded to do other things, whose effects they can see more directly. Also, encourage children in their activism. They are good at making complacent parents take notice at least, if only for social signalling :-) and hopefully some of it sticks when they grow up. Voting shouldn't be seen as the basic thing, which people need to do to show they care in the world. Many people see voting as mostly pointless, and they might even be right compared with other things they can do.
  - badNews 7y ago
    Realistically, voting is an absurd placebo at this point. I don't think opinions about voting, or votes as an expression of opinion work above values of 1,000 in human social systems. If you think about it, this hypothesis holds conceptual water. Head counts in the thousands are the region of sample size where statistics begin to aggregate into commoditized data and spherical cows. Thus, perpetuating the premise of democracy past small town population sizes really only serves as a useful plane of misdirection for social control. No one can realistically be held accountable for democratic blunders that cross large geographies or involve huge voter turnouts. It's essentially fantasy to buy into the narrative. All you need to do is watch 12 Angry Men to catch a glimpse of how and why voting, even with small numbers in extreme microcosms, is really unreliable. And at larger scales, just statistics with manipulated noise. Statistics are simply representative of accidental distributions of facts, monte carlo style. It's certainly blameless, but not well reasoned agency. I'm not saying this to be a cool, edgy pessimist. I'm thinking about everything I've seen happen with my own eyes, plus historical realities. We've avoided world wars since the 1940's like a slug avoids salt. This is not because of governance and democracy, but rather institutional memory. As a meta-organism, we remember the lethal burn of it. It will probably come to the same climactic realization with the biosphere, before this amoeboid sprawl of people recoils in anguish at the experience of disfiguring injury.
- c1sc0 7y ago
  I like to think of this in terms of carbon debt. It is surprisingly easy to calculate the avg. per-capita lifetime carbon debt accrued by someone living in a specific country. It’s a fun metric to compare generational differences (e.g. baby boomers vs millennials) & location-based differences (e.g. USA vs.China) ... last time I did this I can to a carbon debt of EUR 20K for my generation. Which in the grand scheme of things is not all that bad.

perfunctory 7y ago

That's kind of the point. Stop thinking about "most people". Do it for yourself. If you believe in the climate emergency that is. You might be pleasantly surprised to see your friends around you follow the suit.

Redoubts 7y ago
I can’t even get my friends and coworkers to vote.
- jlokier 7y ago
  Perhaps they might be persuaded to do other things, whose effects they can see more directly. Also, encourage children in their activism. They are good at making complacent parents take notice at least, if only for social signalling :-) and hopefully some of it sticks when they grow up. Voting shouldn't be seen as the basic thing, which people need to do to show they care in the world. Many people see voting as mostly pointless, and they might even be right compared with other things they can do.
- badNews 7y ago
  Realistically, voting is an absurd placebo at this point. I don't think opinions about voting, or votes as an expression of opinion work above values of 1,000 in human social systems. If you think about it, this hypothesis holds conceptual water. Head counts in the thousands are the region of sample size where statistics begin to aggregate into commoditized data and spherical cows. Thus, perpetuating the premise of democracy past small town population sizes really only serves as a useful plane of misdirection for social control. No one can realistically be held accountable for democratic blunders that cross large geographies or involve huge voter turnouts. It's essentially fantasy to buy into the narrative. All you need to do is watch 12 Angry Men to catch a glimpse of how and why voting, even with small numbers in extreme microcosms, is really unreliable. And at larger scales, just statistics with manipulated noise. Statistics are simply representative of accidental distributions of facts, monte carlo style. It's certainly blameless, but not well reasoned agency. I'm not saying this to be a cool, edgy pessimist. I'm thinking about everything I've seen happen with my own eyes, plus historical realities. We've avoided world wars since the 1940's like a slug avoids salt. This is not because of governance and democracy, but rather institutional memory. As a meta-organism, we remember the lethal burn of it. It will probably come to the same climactic realization with the biosphere, before this amoeboid sprawl of people recoils in anguish at the experience of disfiguring injury.
c1sc0 7y ago
I like to think of this in terms of carbon debt. It is surprisingly easy to calculate the avg. per-capita lifetime carbon debt accrued by someone living in a specific country. It’s a fun metric to compare generational differences (e.g. baby boomers vs millennials) & location-based differences (e.g. USA vs.China) ... last time I did this I can to a carbon debt of EUR 20K for my generation. Which in the grand scheme of things is not all that bad.