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It's a strange problem. Your actions individually are inconsequential. Logically your individual contribution to the environment is minimal vs the benefite you

It's a strange problem. Your actions individually are inconsequential. Logically your individual contribution to the environment is minimal vs the benefite you gain from using energy intensive resources. Thus it is actually logical for you to drive a car or use energy. Each individual acting in his or her self interest in a rational way brings irrational destruction as a collective action. That is the tragedy. The tragedy of the commons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

8bitsrule 7y ago
If 100,000 people stop driving/flying any more than they have to; if they make sure their walls, windows and ceilings are well-insulated against cold and heat, that's not a tragedy but a great start ... a victory ... which benefits them and 'the environment' we're an inextricable part of. Yes, each of those 100,000 is an individual, but their collective action is the opposite of inconsequential. Mankind thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without the 'intensive energy' he's been talked into shooting into his veins.
- thatcat 7y ago
  I wonder how much the energy required to organize 100k people would reduce the effiency gains of they were accounted for.
ianai 7y ago
It’s also a problem too large to place solely at the hands individual consumers or decision makers. The political economy is rigged against the 99.999999999%. Look how hard he US is fighting against changes to simply decrease gun mass killings and violence. Even if all the voters in the democratic-ish countries voted as a bloc, it wouldn’t be enough. Countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China and the international mega corporations can/will override those choices with their choices and endowments. He closed his article with this: “All I need you to do is want a livable future. This is your planet, and no one can advocate for it like you can. No one can protect it like you can.” It would take a Herculean effort to make a dent in this. Every act of the industrial revolution through to today has contributed to the carbon in the air. It will literally take more than all of the energy expended over all that time and those actions to sequester the carbon released since the industrial revolution. And not even that would get us back to where the planet was before we started releasing carbon.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  > The political economy is rigged against the 99.999999999%. You realize that's ~13x than the number of people on Earth, right? If anything was rigged against everyone but the singular top person in the world, it would only be rigged against the bottom 99.999999987% (vs 99.999999999%)
  - ianai 7y ago
    That’s well within the tolerances for my eye-ball guesstimate.

8bitsrule 7y ago

If 100,000 people stop driving/flying any more than they have to; if they make sure their walls, windows and ceilings are well-insulated against cold and heat, that's not a tragedy but a great start ... a victory ... which benefits them and 'the environment' we're an inextricable part of. Yes, each of those 100,000 is an individual, but their collective action is the opposite of inconsequential. Mankind thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without the 'intensive energy' he's been talked into shooting into his veins.

thatcat 7y ago
I wonder how much the energy required to organize 100k people would reduce the effiency gains of they were accounted for.

ianai 7y ago

It’s also a problem too large to place solely at the hands individual consumers or decision makers. The political economy is rigged against the 99.999999999%. Look how hard he US is fighting against changes to simply decrease gun mass killings and violence. Even if all the voters in the democratic-ish countries voted as a bloc, it wouldn’t be enough. Countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China and the international mega corporations can/will override those choices with their choices and endowments. He closed his article with this: “All I need you to do is want a livable future. This is your planet, and no one can advocate for it like you can. No one can protect it like you can.” It would take a Herculean effort to make a dent in this. Every act of the industrial revolution through to today has contributed to the carbon in the air. It will literally take more than all of the energy expended over all that time and those actions to sequester the carbon released since the industrial revolution. And not even that would get us back to where the planet was before we started releasing carbon.

sokoloff 7y ago
> The political economy is rigged against the 99.999999999%. You realize that's ~13x than the number of people on Earth, right? If anything was rigged against everyone but the singular top person in the world, it would only be rigged against the bottom 99.999999987% (vs 99.999999999%)
- ianai 7y ago
  That’s well within the tolerances for my eye-ball guesstimate.